Hi, thanks for the extensive feedback!
First of all, could you elaborate on the bug? Where did you find it/ When did or does it happen? I would like to recreate it and see where it goes wrong.
Your completely right when it comes to the last level, it's my first time doing level design and this was my only solution to a difficult and last level. I'll take it into account for the next game jams though.
When it comes down to the technical aspects, I'll use bullet points:
- Coding movement player: I think this resource is a good start ('https://kidscancode.org/godot_recipes/4.x/3d/basic_fps/'). It's not everything, but it explains it really well.
- Coding in general: I've recently finished a course on Udemy, 'Complete 3D Godot 4 Game Development Course' by Richard Allbert and Martyna Olivares. I don't know if you use Godot, but this course has helped me a lot, much more than YouTube tutorials ever could. You can tell that it's been given by a professional programmer. It's a lot, +- 40 hours of lectures, but every second is worth it. The last section is a Quake-like which teaches you the fundamentals of a shooter. I don't remember the pricing anymore, but a couple of times in a month, Udemy has a sale, which allows you to buy courses for between 10-15 euros. I highly recommend it!
- Visuals: I'm still searching for my style (I'm inspired by Ultrakill though), and I have yet to find resources for this. I've used Blender for a couple of 100 hours, but never got what I wanted. Then I switched to Blockbench, which is usually for Minecraft models, but you can also make low poly models with it. The big upside, is that it's so simple to use, easy going, and you can texture paint the models very easily with layers (which has a huge impact! You can use a base layer, darken layer for shadows, and a lighten layer for highlights). The downside though is that there aren't a lot of tutorials on the internet. I also don't think the documentation is that well written, so for me, it's still figuring things out as I go along. But I do know that my style lies in that direction, I just have a long way yet to go...
- Textures: I try to take pictures in real-life to use as textures, but this isn't always possible. Therefore I use 'Polyhaven.com' if I need any other textures. Then I resize it in Krita, and if there are seams I make it seamless. I aim for a resolution of 64x64, but it can sometimes differ. In Aseprite, I reduce the amount of colors to 16 or 32. That's basically it.
Game development is indeed hard, and it doesn't get any easier (I'm sure everybody in this game jam knows XD). When I try 10 different things out, 9 of them don't work. If I find an approach that works, I make sure to document it in a Word document so I won't forget it. At a certain point, there simply isn't anybody holding your hand anymore with tutorials, and it's up to us, aspiring game developers, to struggle with this fact. I also believe this is the only way to create our own style, by struggling.
Thanks again for your feedback◝(ᵔᗜᵔ)◜