So I’ve just finished my Entry for the Brakey’s Game Jam 2 with the theme “Love is Blind”. My friend and I went into this jam with only one goal: Make something. Quite a simple good. We have been struggling for a while with releasing something. Our ideas become to bloated, we don’t allot enough time for items in the project, lose motivation, etc. A common thing in game development is the only way to get better at making games is to make them. We accomplished our goal. It was quite the challenge and we had to cut a lot of features we really wanted to add. I committed in the code asking for forgiveness for my programming sins. The game could have been more polished but the deed is done and the ink is dry. The next thing to do is tabulate what I learn from this and make a plan on how I use the lessons learned in the future.

As I mention I learned a lot from this jam and my experience was awesome. I was able to work on a project that would be seen and hopefully people would look at my code. Enough with the fluff here are the lessons that I learned.

• It is not always as simple as you think.
• No matter how sure you are about implementation there is never a nonzero risk of bugs.
• Allot more time to do things.
• The more communication the better.

My friend and I wanted into this project with a simple as possible. Our original idea was a matching game where you were given three picks and the image was blurred and you had to match the client base on a variety of features. I thought that was super simple and wouldn’t take that long. It took longer than I thought. Way longer. I had a whole random character generator planned. I would only take a day right. No it took longer. The part that took the longest was the attribute system. I set out with best of intentions make the Attribute, Client, Match structs but I quickly abandoned that. I wrote file parser (I know I just used Unity’s text asset just let me dream) that read the names and attributes from list. The file format for the attributes would be

Attribute_name, Attribute_id, complment_ids, block_ids.

This prove too much for me and I abandoned it favor of hard coded values. The sad thing is I don’t remember while I didn’t work. I know I knew why but, I think I blocked it out of my memory. Thankfully my idea for the image generator was simple. This leads to the my second and third lessons. I should have made a better schedule for myself and made better use of my time. If I had done this I could have added more. Finally the most important lesson. I should have communicated more. Communication is the most import thing is group projects. We had a meeting on the second day of the jam and another two days before submission.

My final remark is I had set myself a personal goal. Nicely formatted code. I feel that I accomplished that goal.

Overall I had a great experience working on the jam and I would like to thank you for playing the game.