Posted June 27, 2023 by kizurai
#LearnYouDevLog
So last day and it's crunch time.
I've uploaded my file and I'm ready to submit, but first I want to write down all the things I've learned over these past 10 days.
I started this with an idea of learning how to write a Tactics game. I knew it would be difficult, though the scope of difficulty was even more apparent as I progressed. But I have a board, and characters moving around it. I've also learned that there's a very common problem of sprites clipping into the 3D tiles from angled sprite billboarding. That's also another thing that I didn't realize was common: Sprite Billboard.
And then there was the pixel art. I had the program Aseprite since forever ago but I never really had a chance to use it. I'm not good at drawing pixel art, and it's pretty obvious from my lack of animation because just drawing the isometric views took me forever. I think with time and practice I can do better with pixel art, but this is definitely the first step. But I extremely proud because every single pixel art in my game was hand drawn by me so it's awesome to see it all in action.
Hoo boy, I learned a lot actually. Maybe 20% of the tutorial I did actually made it into my brain, but learning animation controllers, sprite renderers, asset creation, music implementation, while probably all easy, I'm proud of all the stuff I did. I'm a generally anxious and hesitant person - I even had to look up how to Build the game just in case I do something wrong - so putting it out there is a huge step for me.
Also, I manually typed out everything while I did tutorials and I do feel like I learned a bit from osmosis. I also took the time to understand what I was writing which is why it took me so long (I didn't even finish the tutorial on time). It got to the point where as I was adding new things outside of the tutorial, I knew exactly where to put it, and if I didn't, I could find where to put it.
I feel like this is pretty much answered but I always feel like if I can look back and think: "I would totally do that differently" then I must have grown.
Liquid Fire's Tactics Tutorial was the bulk of what I used, as well as the Sprite Billboard video, then there's the How to Build video. It was really unfortunate that this was the time when reddit pretty much shut down so I couldn't use a lot of the r/gamedev resources but still somehow made do! So that's what matters.
I was extremely busy this week. Running charity events on top of work on top of gamejamming.... I am TIRED and I am ready to sleep for the next month.
I think just the results and pushing myself to actually make a game. I'm ADHD so I work better with deadlines and without a deadline I just keep saying "oh I'll make something" and then put it off for the next decade, so this is the most progress I've ever made on a game in my entire life.
Most definitely could do stuff differently now that I have more knowledge of it. First off, maybe don't start with a tactics game LOL that is not a type of game you want to go from start to finish in 10 days. Another is to keep my scope veeeery small. I technically made a lot of my goals from yesterday and I think Day 9's goals were the right amount for a gamejam scope. It was simple, only needed a few things, but still took me at least 2 days to get it all working.
Thank you for reading this far, I hope it helps... anyone haha
And thank you to the people who ran the gamejam, I appreciate you all.