Introduction/Postmortem

Thanks for checking out my game! This was developed as part of My First Game Jam: Winter 2023, and my first foray into developing with Unity. Since this was my first game jam and my first multi-day game project, I wanted to write a little (okay, maybe a lot) about myself and my experience over the past week and a half. 

I have a bit of a jack-of-all-trades background: a basic grasp of programming, art/animation, and sound design, but no way to tie it all together. I'm also an instructional designer by day, and while the software we use for interactive courses is far less sophisticated than a game engine, it does help me get a handle on the logic of triggers and interactions. A few months ago I was introduced to Bitsy and made a little game with it (on my profile if you want to check it out), and that encouraged me to join the jam and set further goals.

My goal for this jam was to learn how to use Unity enough to finish a simple game. I definitely didn't want to set my expectations too high - a five minute game is fine if that's what I can get polished and finished in two weeks.

The idea I ran with was a little concept I came up with a while ago, which I thought would be simple enough for a short game. The gameplay would be basically a minigame - tap the left and right arrows to keep a character balanced, as if it were on a tightrope. The "story" is drawn from my experience as a trans man, and having to un-learn the slouch I had adopted to hide my chest. After top surgery, it took me a while to readjust to being able (and proud!) to stand up straight. I came up with a couple other little "balancing acts", and away I went.

I started with GMTK's fantastic fundamentals of Unity tutorial, which I truly cannot recommend enough if you're interested in learning Unity. He does an amazing job walking you through the basic concepts of the engine in order to make a Flappy Bird clone - it's not the most in-depth tutorial ever, but it's great for getting you to hit the ground running. It took me about 3 hours to follow the 40 minute video, and then I opened a new project and within 2 hours I had a working prototype of the balancing mechanism for my game. That first night, my big innovation on the tutorial was getting the UI slider (the green square) to slide back and forth to track the tilt angle of the "character," which required a bit of math and a lot of hesitantly written code.

Over the first week I coded a countdown timer that started whenever the indicator went into the "win" or "danger" zones, added the red pulse effect while in the danger zones, made win and fail states, and added sound. I became very familiar with Unity's UI game objects, which are handled differently than most game objects.

I had planned to do most of the art during the second week, but ended up making the stage 1 background and character first so that I could work out the scrolling background and sprite animation. I also wanted to get the UI code and appearance completely worked out before creating additional stages since they'd essentially be clones (plus, polish was more important to me than multiple stages). The end of week one and the weekend was a lot of bug fixes and UI graphics, creating a title screen, and cloning the first scene into multiple stages tied together with buttons. I also added some quality of life stuff, like a "return to menu" button and making sure the start, win, and lose screens froze the character.

I've run into a time crunch on the second week (real life, aaagh!) so while I still have some nice-to-have features on the list, I decided to bring it all together relatively early in the week so that I could submit by mid-week.

This was a great experience! I feel much more confident with Unity, and prepared to tackle other game ideas I have. It was also great to see that I could manage a hobby project with a full-time day job, since I was excited to work on it in my free time. If/when I do another jam, I'll definitely join the discord to participate more in discussion/playtesting/bug help.

Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for sticking it out through this extremely long post - can't wait to check out everyone's games!