So, on Sunday I completed a submission for yet another game jam—Mini Jam 72, “Adventure”. So if I completed it on Sunday, why am I only posting about it now? Well, mostly because of time issues. Due to the game jam, I didn’t get as much sleep over the weekend as I should have—especially since I hadn’t really gotten as much sleep as I should have the week before, thanks to preparing for classes. Of course, the game jam meant I also didn’t really prepare for my Monday classes before Sunday night either, which meant I had to do that after the game jam and I didn’t get much sleep Sunday night either. Which meant that I was very tired during school on Monday, and after school (I almost typed “when I got home, but that’s not really accurate, because with the schools closed down due to the coronavirus I’m currently working from home and teaching over Zoom)… well, I fell asleep, and didn’t really have time to make a post yesterday.
Truth be told, I didn’t have much time over the weekend as I wish I had either. I say I completed a submission, but, eh, well… I submitted something, but I wouldn’t say it was “completed”. Since the theme was “adventure”, I wanted to make an adventure game, and further flesh out some of the game mechanics and code that I started for Pieces. And I did; I made some refinements to the dialogue and inventory systems to make them easier to use (for the game creator; there’s not much change in the experience for the player), and this time I implemented an intro and tutorial at the beginning of the game to illuminate the game’s story and help the player learn the controls. And, unlike my previous game, this time I even made the time to put in a title screen and some music! The problem is that by the time I got all this done, I didn’t really have time for anything else, so… the bulk of the game, or what I’d planned for the game, is missing. There’s an intro and tutorial, and then it… pretty much ends. Oops.
The idea for the game wasn’t a problem this time; I came up with an idea pretty early on. The game jam’s limitation was that death had to be a game mechanic, so I planned to make an adventure game where when the player died they briefly became a ghost before returning to life, and there were some things that could only be accomplished as a ghost, so figuring out how to die on purpose in some specific times and places would be important to solve puzzles. It later occurred to me that this was kind of similar to a previous game I’d started, Last Day to Live, which, coincidentally, had used death as a game mechanic as well—but then, maybe there are only so many ways to implement death as a game mechanic (well, there are probably a lot more ways I didn’t think of, honestly).
Maybe I bit off more than I could chew and was too ambitious, but honestly, if I’d had the full three days to work on it and had other circumstances not intervened, there’s a good chance I could have gotten a lot more done. But there are at least four reasons that didn’t happen.
First, well, there’s the simple matter of time. Again, I’d come up with the idea for the game my Thursday night not long after the game jam began, but I’m working full time as a teacher, which means I was teaching during the day on Friday, and couldn’t really start until Friday afternoon. But even then, well… like I said, I hadn’t got much sleep the last week due to work, so I was tired during the weekend and… didn’t sleep as much as I should have then, either, but I probably could have got by on a lot less sleep during the weekend had I had more sleep the week before. Anyway, yeah, work time cut into my time for the game jam.
But that wasn’t even necessarily the biggest factor. Another big factor this time around was computer issues. I’d mentioned in my last post that I’d been having some trouble with my laptop; well, I’d arranged this weekend to have my laptop’s screen fixed. It had been randomly going blank, or just a vertical band across the screen had been going blank, and while I could get it working again by jiggling it, this was annoying and time-wasting… and more importantly, it was happening increasingly often, so it was clear that there was something seriously wrong with my laptop screen and that in time if it wasn’t attended to it was likely to stop working altogether. I was also getting a bigger hard drive installed while I was at it, since the hard drive my laptop came with was rather small and perpetually almost full. This had to be done over the weekend, though, because it couldn’t be done overnight, and I needed my laptop every day for school—again, I’m teaching over Zoom for now, and while I do have other computers, I don’t have other computers with working webcams. So I had to take my laptop in after school on Friday, but this also involved making sure I had all my files from it backed up… which it turned out I didn’t, so I had to finish backing them up, and that took time.
But more to the point, this also meant that I couldn’t use my laptop to work on my game. I had to use my desktop, which, unfortunately, has a lot less memory (I really need to get a new desktop, when I can afford it), and when I had Unity, Blender, Adobe Illustrator, and Photoshop all open at once, it could seriously lag. (The alternative would have been to not have them open at once, but only open them as I needed them, but given the amount of time it takes most of those programs to start up, I’m not sure that would have been any better.) At one point on Sunday afternoon, my computer froze up completely; it eventually became responsive enough for me to make sure all my work was saved and reboot, but, again, that cost me time. Shortly after that, I got a message that my laptop was ready for pickup, so then I could copy the game onto my laptop and work from it there again… but it turned out that I’d had a more recent version of Unity on my desktop than on my laptop, so before working on the game on my laptop I had to install a newer version of Unity. More time.
Third, though, well, I just had some issues getting things working with Unity. I wrote in my last post about how apparently I was getting more comfortable programming in Unity, and how everything was going smoothly and when I tried to code things up I got them working on the first try? That… didn’t happen this time. There were a number of times I got stuck and couldn’t get something working, and spent way too much time trying to figure out what was wrong, when it turned out to be something very simple that a more experienced Unity programmer would have spotted right away. To wit:
- I kept trying to add a NavMesh to the environment, and nothing kept happening. Turned out I just had to set the environment object to static.
- The OnPointerEvent functions on my dialogue windows weren’t firing, and I couldn’t figure out why not. Turned out I just had to add an EventSystem to the scene.
- In the second part of the game, the character kept walking around waist deep in the ground she was supposed to be walking on top of, and no amount of moving either the ground or the character’s starting point would resolve this. Turned out it was because while I’d moved the object representing the ground, I hadn’t rebaked the NavMesh after doing so.
Yeah, turns out I guess last time I got lucky, and I still have a long way to go learning Unity.
But the fourth thing that may have prevented me from getting more done than I did is that… well, maybe I’m just getting a little burned out. I want to get more practice with Unity and with game creation, but maybe I’m overdoing it. I’ve participated in three game jams in the last month, on top of holding down a full-time job (and the kind of full-time job that requires a lot of prep time outside of the official work hours), and maybe that’s a bit much? I don’t know, but I admit I just wasn’t feeling as excited about this game jam as I had about the last two. That could be because the theme and limitation didn’t pique my interest as much, but it’s more likely just a kind of fatigue. Maybe I could have stayed up later, found more time to work on the game, been more focused and avoided distractions and not made as many mistakes, if I’d just had more energy and enthusiasm.
Or not. I don’t know.
So whither now? Well, I had been thinking of participating in the ct.js game jam… it’s already half over at this point, but I knew that I was going to miss the first few days due to the overlap with the Mini Jam anyway; I figured I could still get a late start and get something done. And I still could. But I’d been so busy with work I hadn’t even finished getting through the tutorials as I’d hoped to, and, eh, like I said, I’m feeling a little burned out, so… we’ll see. And then there’s the next Mini Jam, theme currently TBA. That’s in (a little less than) two weeks; will I be feeling by then like jumping into another jam? Again, we’ll see. Honestly, if I’m feeling this overwhelmed, I probably should take a break for a while. But I’m an idiot, so I probably won’t.
In other matters, if I’m going to be getting back into going through more Unity tutorials—which at some point I want to do—I really ought to learn more about rigging and animating characters for Unity. So far the characters in all my game jam entries have been jointless, unanimated figures because I… don’t know how to do anything else. (I did follow some online instructions to make animated characters for Last Day to Live, but I’m still not really comfortable enough with the process to want to try to do it during a game jam—and besides even for that I used an animation pack rom the Asset Store; I don’t know how to create my own character animations.) So yeah, I think that’s the next thing I’m going to make an effort to learn about.
But in the meantime, for now I ought to… well, among other things, I ought to get ready for my classes tomorrow. *Sigh…*
Oh, and at some point this time before the judging window closes I ought to play and rate some of the other Mini Jam entries, too.
Speaking of which, you can play my game, The Drink of Immortality—what there is of it—, here.
