Radioactive Doom Ninja | Postmortem

Tools Used: Unity, Blender, Reaper

Assets from: Unity Store, Open Game Art, Brackeys

You never really know how hard something is unless you do it yourself. This was my goal and I achieved it. I began the week thinking I could make a 3d character run down a hallway with a barrel in its hands, the object being you had to balance the character and race to the end without spilling. While making my barrel I ran into a few design issues and decided to go 2d platformer and scale down a bit. This gave me some new challenges which I will take into my next project. Since this was my first and worst game jam game, I am pleased with the result. 

Day 1 - I used this day to design a concept for my game which ended up changing after a few days anyway. I was so sure about my idea of a wobbly player running down a hallway with an open radioactive barrel trying not to spill it. It was out of scope though. 

Day 2 - I spent the day designing my barrel which the character would hold, I guess not knowing how to do this at the start of the day would have been a key indicator to not waste time so early on. 

Day 3 - After spending the night designing my barrel I realised I didn't have a player and didn't know how to make the mechanics work so he could wobble. This is when I decided to change my mind and go with a 2d platformer. 

Day 4 - I used this day to design my level and spent a lot of the day researching how to make a parallaxing effect for my background. I found the tutorial I needed at Brackeys YouTube channel and borrowed the script he uses as well. I found this to be a really big learning curve, because I had finally begun to understand the structure of C# script and what each part is used for. 

Day 5 - I downloaded some sprites and tiles to build my level and animate my characters. This was hard for me because I had no idea what I was doing and also because every time I tested a sprite in unity it wouldn't let me slice the sheets up. This is something I will have to work on and would save me so much time. 

Day 6 - I spent all day working on animating my character and getting him to flip on the x axis when I pressed a key. This gave me a bug in my character controller script but for the first time I was able to solve the issue on my own. Although it was something simple, it was a proud moment for me to be able to solve a fundamental issue so late in the project. Debugging will come up a lot in the future and I no doubt will have to come to terms with this part of game development. 

Submission - I wanted to make a WebGL version of my game so that I could get as many people to play it on as many plaforms as possible. I knew if I gave a download link, I wouldn't get the feedback I was after by as many people. Once again I had no idea how to do this, so I YouTubed it. It was really simple in the end and I will be doing this for all of my upcoming releases. 

Things I was happy with:

1. I was happy with the music I had created for the game. It was inspired by the Hotline Miami soundtrack not for any particular reason, but just because I like that type of music. You can listen here: 
2. The amount I learnt while trying to make this game
3. The background parallaxing effect

Things I could have done better: 

1. Create a menu page
2. Have an end state to the game
3. Spend more time learning sprite animation 
4. Stick to the one concept and see it through
5. Work in some sound design for the player animation
6. Have more interaction between the player and the enemy
7. Work out how the player can win and lose. 

Conclusion

Overall I am happy with this game. It is my first and I have already got some great feedback for it. I will take everything on board and work on it for my next game jam. I think taking a week off from jamming will be good to let everything sink in and just learn a little more about what went wrong/right in this project. I think it would be worth doing another 2d platformer for my next jam so I can really get good at some of the concepts involved in making them.  I had fun and am looking forward to my nex game.