Well, I did it! First game in the bag.
The purpose of making these small games is to refine my skills as a developer and give me small achievable projects that I can work on in my very limited spare time. In the words of Epictetus "If you want to be a writer, write" So if I want to be a game dev, I should develop games!
I thought I would keep things as simple as possible with an endless runner type game. I made a flappy bird clone once and it wasn’t too difficult. The game I choose to emulate was an old mobile game called Robot Unicorn attack by Adult Swim.
I played this game quite a lot and I think it’s a really good example of something very simple that actually feels really good to play!
There’s a few nice little platforming mechanics that really give the player control, from the way you jump and boost, to boosts getting replenished when you smash through stars to get maintain the flow of the game and get more points,
My game at the end looked like this! And I was pretty chuffed!
Lessons learned from the past that I applied here.
1) I straight up uploaded my project to Git so I could access my project from anywhere. This was really helpful and allowed me to easily work on my project during my lunch breaks at work.
2) Squeeze in all the time you can! Normally I wake up at 5:30am, have some breakfast watch the news and leave for work at 6:30am. Just by getting up half an hour earlier and skipping the morning news gave me a good hour to work on my project. I only did this a couple of times but it was very productive and I will try to do it more, that's for certain.
3) I still have a slight problem with scope. Or maybe I just need to squeeze in more morning sessions. I wanted to do more and still do. I was very tempted to work on this game for another week but that would defy the point of the exercise I think. Polish and tweaking the game design would definitely take longer than I think it would in my head. So many things like improved collision detection, multiple lives, storing the scores between then creating the UI menus and game flow. It would take a week to do half of that stuff alone!
4) As you can see, I stuck with project management using trello. Even for such a micro project, I still found this helpful for keeping me focused on the task at hand.
5) I learned about some great tools in Unity too. The 2DSpriteShape component will be so useful making my next game which will be a side scrolling shooter! This is using the power of the engine to good effect rather than write stuff from scratch like I would in the past.
In summary
That was a lot of fun! Will see what this week holds in store for the next project. If you want to check out the source code you can take a look at the Git repository here.
I can definitely see myself coming back to this project, polishing it up for a few weeks and releasing it on the App Store or Steam.
I made a time lapse showing the building of the game from start to finish so go check it out on YouTube if you like! It was really enjoyable to go back and remind myself why this stuff takes as long as it does!
Thanks for checking in and I'll see you next week!
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