Post by Shoobius in What new things did you learn in this jam?

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I learned a lot from this jam, which was a first in making a game, using an engine, and joining a jam. I learned a ton about the Godot engine ( and I guess kinda how game engines work in general lol) and how the node system worked, and about how to make amatuer music, and how to work with a team, and that's just the half of it. Basically everything I know about making games and game engines was learned in the last week :D. But in general, 2 big things stuck out to me.

1) Time management is key. It's great and all if you can make a dialogue system with the ability to have different animations/sounds played for each character and line, and have skippable and non-skippable dialogue, and with conversations that can be easily changed by outside events, but if that takes up half of your development time, so much so that you can use none of these features and the quality of the whole game suffers, it's probably not a good idea to implement all that. (And yes, that's abstractly specific, definitely isn't what happened to me and my team...okay, fine, it's exactly what happened).

2) A little less serious, but still important...If it's your first time using a certain game engine (or any game engine in general) and you think "Hey, I'll work on my game until 9:55 and submit it in the 5 minutes before 10 AM! What an amazing idea!", DO NOT LISTEN TO YOUR BRAIN, SUBMIT EARLIER BECAUSE YOU CAN'T LEARN HOW TO EXPORT A GAME IN LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES WITH ZERO EXPERIENCE/FORETHOUGHT. So yeah, my team missed the deadline because of me. That was a big learning experience, a mistake I will definitely never make again lol.

Overall, it was a super fun experience and I'm really glad I participated. Here is the link to my game, which is not in the jam but I'd still really appreciate feedback: https://trinitygamesdev.itch.io/buffcat.

Woolamander4 years ago

Oh my goodness... your points 1 & 2 struck so close to home!!

I knew I needed a dialogue system so I started from scratch with Brackeys tutorial on a basic dialogue. That got me about 10% of what I wanted to accomplish so I spent 2-3 more days building on it to work for my team's game. That was 2-3 days I didn't have to spent on such a small part of the overall project. I'm happy I had Josh stream my game though where I learned about the Unity asset called Fungus to make dialogue systems easier. Looking at overhauling my game with Fungus now (gross name lol.)

I learned the day before deadline how to export my project to game, but I was stressing until the last minute getting a working webGL build which sadly I never fixed in time.

And here's the link to Fungus if you're still interested in learning it for dialogue system implementation:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/fungus-34184

Shoobius4 years ago

Glad to know I'm not the only one! You were smart and had the forethought to look at how to export your game beforehand. I kid you not, my literal thought process began and ended with "Yeah, I'll just submit it at 9:50 day of" for the entirety of the project. At no point until the final 2 minutes before the submission deadline did it cross my mind that "I have absolutely no idea how to do this", and thus my next though was "I am completely and utterly screwed". I also need to get way better at utilizing third party public assets (code snippets or plugins like Fungus) instead of building it all out myself; even though doing it ourselves is more fun for me and my team, jams are probably the worst environment to DIY because of the time crunch. On the bright side, it was better to learn all this my first time and build good habits for Vimjam 2021 than to build bad ones, so it all turned out well in the end.