Post by PicusB in What You Learned this Jam

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Hey, great topic! I am going to make a more thorough Dev Log or two about this, but in summary:

- Plan for the unexpected - Our team went down a member (50%) early on so it significantly changed what was reasonable for scope

- Have alternatives planned and features ready that would be nice to have but not critical

- Strive to produce your MVP in advance of the deadline (the sooner the better) so you can test, tweak and iterate.

This is my second completed game Jam and the first one had some great lessons in it about collaboration and time management (3-man Team with the short Ludum Dare Timeline). This one ended up being mostly solo so really built on planning and time management more than anything :) Trello has been invaluable to me in all my recent projects, especially this one to help with most of these challenges :)

On the technical side, I learned a LOT this jam too since I decided to go with Unity HDRP (First time using SRP/HDRP).

- Lighting is completely different in HDRP, and i went with the most different option (physically based lighting). Based on some early feedback I'm guessing this was a mixed success (evidently my dark nights are too dark!). This said, you can achieve some absolutely beautiful and fantastic things using the new options and I can't wait to see it evolve further (and continue giving UE5 a run for it's money!). I likely spent about a week, studying and evaluating different options and working through some problems.

- I am not an artist. I have a bunch of purchased Assets I like to use to fill that gap until I can spend more time developing those skills. But on a project like this, I often can't find exactly what I need for free so I ended up making quite a bit with mixed success. I certainly gained some confidence and ability in creating and modeling 3d objects (although I really need to spend time getting to learn at least one of Maya or Blender!).

- Shaders. They're cool and fun to play with but there's a lot to learn there, especially when it comes to the advanced features of Shader Graph or Amplify Shader. I learned a lot here and got to apply some of what I learned :)

Ah and here is breaking time if you want to check it out!

https://picusb.itch.io/breaking-time

Pat Tompkins4 years ago

Thanks for the thoughts! I completely agree that focusing on the MVP and building out from there is the way to go. I actually had all the core design and gameplay dont maybe halfway through this jam then focused on fine tuning things like audio, animations and the story. I also dove into lighting for the first time this jam and had a blast doing so. It was a little complicated at first but once I figured it out it was hard for me to not put lights on everything in the game haha.

For some reason your game is super laggy on my machine and isn’t really playable. I’m assuming the problem is on my end but can’t figure out how to get it to play smoothly. It looks great though!!!

PicusB4 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Hey Rompkins!

I'm sorry for that the game isn't playable :( I think it likely has to do with the real time lighting going on everywhere and the draw distances. Clearly my models aren't very high poly! (lol). HDRP seems to have steep system requirements : https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@8.1/manual/index.html. Let me know if for some reason you think that's not the problem and I'll delve into it a bit (or make an option to adjust the camera draw distance :)).