Day 4 of the build and fingers-crossed the main development is now done. We'd planned to complete main development today and just leave the final day for writing levels and tuning them and finessing the game play. We had a bit of a crunch today and broke our rule of only working 9 to 6 and had an extra 2 hours today just to ensure we were good for tomorrow.
It's interesting just how different working on a GameJam is to my day to day development work is. I normally work with "low-level" code & messaging and can spend days or weeks on just one issue. With the GameJam I find we're swapping constantly between lots of issues and there has to be constant communication between the two of us. I can say version control has been invaluable and allowed us to work on the same pieces of code – merge changes when we are both done. Same with JIRA, by being rather anal with this we’ve ensure that neither of us has missed or forgotten anything.
We’ve finally managed to get Unity to “behave” for the both of us; again, maybe because my day to day work is low-level is why I find the “high-level-ness” of Unity to be restrictive. Still we’re getting to learn it now; with what we have learnt I can look at the code and know that if we were to do this again we’d do a lot of it differently.
The art work done by Jack’s younger brothers has been great – MS Paint can be used to make some very cool stuff. Tom in particular has been a star and produced 19 of the backdrops.
So tomorrow we start building the levels and tuning them.
As a teaser this is the background to the final level – I post it here as it’s likely few players will ever be able to get that far into the game.
