My First Game Jam: Brackey's Game Jam 2022.1

I had been learning about game development on and off for years, but several months ago I finally put down the tutorials and got to work creating a Flappy Bird clone called Dragon Flapper. It was not much, completed in just a weekend, but it was a project that actually had an ending to it. Several months went by without much progress on anything else as I got swept up in work, but then in November I tried again to make a game. I spent several days prototyping another 2D game, this time based on placing down launchpads that would send an object to a goal. Once again though, I went on hiatus.

When I saw the Brackeys Game Jam news, I knew this was my moment to finally put everything together and start off the year strong. I pulled up Unity and made sure everything was updated and my folders were set up. I double checked that I had all my resources bookmarked. Finally, I grabbed a Humble Bundle full of Synty Store assets to use -- because it is always a blast using low-poly models.

Once the theme was announced, I had to plan out what kind of game I would make. My original idea was brainstormed in a Trello Card. 

I had originally thought about doing a top-down game where you had to find out ways to escape a building. This would require a character model, possibly animations, and designing levels knowing that the player could see everything. I quickly decided to shift to using a first person controller so I could hide the map layout while also adding immersion. The other benefit was I did not need animations or to focus on the character model at all. 

However, it took me most of Sunday to get the controller set up properly. The Unity starter asset I used was supposed to import Cinemachine and the new Input System. It raised an error message about Cinemachine, so I manually installed that. However, an error was never raised that it was missing the Input System and it took me an hour of debugging to figure out it was missing. The second issue I ran into with this controller was when I was setting up collisions. 

You see that cylinder laying on the floor? That is the player's RigidBody. It is supposed to calculate when I hit a door and allow me to go through it. However, it fell over and I never noticed that during test since it did not have a mesh. It would then get stuck on walls and prevent me from entering doorways or even triggering the interactions. The simple fix would be to just freeze the rotation and position. Despite the RigidBody staying in place, doors would still no open for me. Before they would periodically open if I got the RigidBody in the right position, but now they were completely not working.

After 2 hours of tinkering, I finally realized the starter asset player object had a physical radius that encompassed the RigidBody, leading to it hitting on doors instead of the RigidBody. I shrunk the size down and then the entire game worked as intended.

But what was the core game loop? The players would start in a small corner office, turn around, and try to find the exit for that level. Once they reached it, the game manager will check if they have any levels left and determine to load the next one or load the win screen.

 To set all of this up, I used the system Brackey's mentioned in the Game Jam video: creating a list of "Must Have", "Should Have", "Could Have", and "Wont Have" features. This helped me narrow my scope down and ensure only critical features were worked on. While prototyping the main loop, I realized things were not necessarily "fun" yet, so I splurged a few hours on detailing the level to include hidden secrets and building a basic environment for the player to explore on their own.

Once that was finished, I added a start menu with credits to ensure that the entire loop worked. Just like that, I had a finished game! However, it was not quite fun enough for me. I designed a quick textbox to appear when the user walked over "story elements" and placed it at key junctions I wanted them to pay attention to. I then added the fire to the level and had it trigger after a set amount of time. Both of these objects became Prefabs to use again.

The Synty pack was an amazing tool for rapidly setting up levels and adding nice details. The first level was more of an office, so I wanted the second to be a maintenance area, Thankfully Synty had plenty of assets for me to work with and I created a warehouse-like room to hold industrial and surplus equipment. I also spent more time creating context clues to where to go and hinting at the greater story.

Once everything was wrapped up on Saturday, I was ready to export my build and upload it to Itch.io. 

Then came the worst issue...I had not built a game in over a year. I uploaded my executable to Itch and to double check it worked, I downloaded the file but it would not play. I quickly double checked my directory and realized the build was supposed to have data folders and other files. Running through the build again, everything was finally uploaded and working. However, my field of view was narrow and had a nauseating effect when the player moved too fast. I quickly jumped back in Unity to fix this, tweak some other settings, and re-uploaded everything at midnight Sunday, just 5 hours before the deadline. 

Two critical mistakes I did not catch until I woke up the next day: I did not polish my game page at all and I submitted a downloadable file instead of a WebGL build. This meant my game would not stand out or be seen in searches, plus people were less likely to download a game if they could not play it in the browser. Several days after the submissions closed, I finally got around to creating a cover image, thumbnail, uploaded screenshots, and styled the page to look appealing. After that, my ratings finally climbed across the 20 threshold I was aiming for.   

Overall, this was a fun experience with many lessons learned. I received good feedback to build off of and am planning to work more on this game with a "0.5" release slated for 2 months out. I have no idea how long it will take to build everything I want, but to ease me into things I will also be working on other jams and prototypes for fun. 

If you want to play mayor, check it out at: https://satireninja.itch.io/mayor