So.... umm yes, I am back. And yes this time I joined another game Jam.
Here's the link to that before I even start to talk about my experience with this Jam.
[(https://mungymug.itch.io/teragrowth)]
So yes, this time the Jam was different. Its a 2 day Jam, and after my first experience on Jam, I was thinking. How hard could it be.
I was very wrong on that. This was a disaster, but one that is very fruitful and I learnt alot about in the process of making. I knew that for this Jam, I wanted to go for a simpler game, and one that is more art-ish in a way. So I decided to do my own art. And let's jsut say it wasn't easy but it turned out alright.
Art has always been something that I sucked at, but after doing it for like the past week, I realise its about the rules that you should follow to come up with good art. Not gonna dive much into that though. What I am going to talk about though is these 3 things
Unity - Canvas
Unity - Build Profiles
My experience overall
So Unity Canvas... holy hell it was a disaster trying to use it. I expected it to be around the same but using a Canvas and just importing PNGs into the project made Unity lagged up so badly everything time I try to make changes to the code. It's so annoying.
Ui elements were even worse on Unity, me- the newbie thinking that everything will look just fine as long as the play window looks good jsut decided to carry on and build the game. I knew I wanted to make a web based one this time as, web based games tend to do better. That was my first step.
But i did not chekc my build profile and resolution for it, so I jsut did my canvas and UI with my play window at 1920 * 1080 resolution, low and behold, it did not turn out well.
Mistakes I made was not understanding how canvas works in unity.
A thing that is important is the anchor for Ui elements, it ensure that no matetr what size and resolution it is, the thing will be in the correct spot. This is something that I have to look into and understand more.
Another thing that I seriously did not do is...
PREFABS, I mean look at this mess... I literally had to go and changed everything one by one, making sure that yes, it works as intended, but with proper prefabs implementation, this would have been a breeze.
One good thing that I have picked up and will be using more often from now on is a Game Manager, this is crucial in helping me manage all my game states and scene changes, its like a central hub reallys help to keep things more organised. But... of course I did not really made full use of it.
Another thing I would bashed myself for, even though I know it aint right, but because I was so anxious about the Jam, I literally say screw it code. I mean... here's a look
Like what in the world is this... This can be simplified into a simple function, but guess what I just did... yeah copy paste copy paste, at first it was okay, but as the game expanded, I got lost. Never ever will I do it again. This is not coding by all means. Its a disaster.
But really back to Game Managers, it really help streamlined my buildign process making it easy for me to jsut go to one thing, because I know that is where everything is connected to. I mean for a small project its fine, but as it gets bigger, I think things should change.
But look at this image, it really shows you how easy it is to locate these things. Just game manager, cause its there.
Lastly though... are my thoughts. Game Jams, there are great and an extremely good way to really apply what you learn and test yourself at the same time while having fun. Though 2 days ended up causing more stress than fun, I did enjoy myself and learnt many things along the way. Will I do it again if i ahve the chance? Probabably not yet... UNTIL I get a better grasp of the engine. I gotta test and tweak and play around with it by myself. But other than that. Thank you for even bothering to read. That is if there is anyone.