here's a breakdown
#started working on a project for game jam saw the package and added it (clearly not attempting to reinvent the wheel making a character controller)
#made an ability design where you could take life force from living object and you use them to traverse the world.
#programmed for the ability and Npc design also made adjustments to the environment to work with the ability completed two environments out of the 5 made rough blueprint of two more levels
#Realize that I haven't worked on the game characters asked the artist on the team if he can do 2d animations he said he can't so i had to do that he provided the sprites (I mean that guy was nice to work with)
#Here is where it all comes crashing 2days or i think a day before deadline while animating and testing the animation unity dose it normal hot reload after i exited play mode and just get stuck for a minute or so , I was like hmmmm but deadline was close i could not afford to investigate why ,then i then went to import to change the import settings for some images only for me to get stuck on load menu for over 30 minutes
#I knew I had to cut my loss unity just crashed I had to accept it, went on to start a new project thinking I was wise i mean i can just drag and drop the asset from the previous project, import the dependencies and upgrade to urp and i should be back where i was, bet
# I was wrong after doing all that, turn out when unity crashed some meta data files got corrupted and all prefab files lost their reference (missing prefab with guid error)
#tried fixing this but there were no way-out files had already been renamed and files path changed so i was left with an empty scene with empty game objects and just my code
#i mean you just have to go on, so I started re-creating the levels and also the prefab,
# submission day realized i couldn't complete more than two levels threes if I was lucky so I decided once I was done with two levels i would just move over to making the game more aesthetically pleasing well few hours to submissions very funny game started serializing assets and didn't stop kept on reloading and reloading i knew oh no part2 of unity crash
#I got very frustrated after pulling an all-night work to try to make something now it all gone(AGAIN) if it was left to me alone i would have just closed my pc and yh call it a day end of game jam but no it wasn't i had people on my back that had put effort into this game(also the artist had pull an all-night work too we both had jobs during the day also the marketing lady) with all this stress i was forced to go oh no i just have to come up with something you can't let this people down
# The only way we ever have something playable was to build on what we have ,so I added some levels, made some custom obstacles, add the credits at the end of the game, made some background effects (parallax behavior) and the game menu screen test and build within i think 3 hrs not sure but an hour or 2 early before submission
now let me address your concern:
I didn't just take an existing asset and submit i made changes definitely not much enough that is different from the original but enough it not the exact (level 29-32 were added) not proud of this though but it was the best i could do within the timeframe, i couldn't delete the existing level cause then it would feel too blank if you took some time to play through or at least skip to end and jump you would see the end credit and I stated on the note that this was made from an existing assets could not add the direct link though the name was there
and also the dev tool was left there cause if you played on mobile you wouldn't see it cause unity onGui method is not called but on web it is and I was very much sure that it would most likely be played on pc and whoever is playing can skip some levels they find hard and get to the end credit , basically it was just there so you could skip to the end credit and read
and thanks for the advice i just reviewed my game dev career and the result is yh I think I may be back full time i mean after leaving it for like 3 year or so to become a web dev, that dabbled in backend marketing and some vs code extension, I like the experience i had coming back to game dev , l agree i did learn some stuff during this game jam like team management, speed vs efficiency, work schedules also the first time i have a personal published game project most of my personal stuff ended on my hard drive, and yh source control is 1000000000000% important use git always every time like before you start use git, after anything use git push origin main
lastly if your attempt was to criticize based of hey this person is trying to scam us i get why you would say that but that was never the intention , but the statement " You need to rethink your game dev journey if you really submitted this" ko nessassari my dear, that more of an insult, it just a game jam and i made sure to confirm there was no prize pool so yh i was trying to scam to win money or anything and thank you for commending the art the guy deserves also do the same for the marketing lady she too deserves some accolades
rain just stooped need and i need to go to work time to prepare also if you still doubt i can upload the files for the two crashed project to a goggle drive and share the link here so you can check their meta data to confirm my claim. Thanks