Spikey Bird Postmortem

This post is slightly late as I wanted to create a game for Flappy Jam. I was going to do this last weekend but as is too often the case, things came up so my plans got postponed.

What Went Right

When I am coding a game, I tend to use the approach of just using placeholder artwork (generally coloured blocks and spheres) replacing it with art once the game is functional. Unity isn’t really a programming-based platform so this approach just didn’t feel right. Instead, the artwork was created first and plugged into the Unity project. This approach really worked well which probably isn’t too surprising as Unity is aimed at designers. The nice thing about this approach is you get something closer to the final product right away.

Mixed Blessings

Writing a script to generate the level on the fly is something that is right up my alley. Procedurally generated content in theory offers unlimited replay as no two games will be alike. In reality, the content always seems to be similar enough that the replay value is never as great as it should be. Controlling the difficulty is also not as easy as it would be with hand-built levels. When it comes to a graphical design tool you also have the disadvantage of not having the level visible until you are running the game.

What Went Wrong

One of the cardinal rules of Game Jams is “be familiar with your tools/language before starting.” I am not familiar with either Unity or with C# so developing a game using Unity with C# for the scripting language was probably not a wise decision. Of the 20 hours I spent creating this game, over half of the time was spent searching documentation and the internet for information. Minor things, such as finding the length of a list (C# Lists use Count instead of the length that I am use to) had to be figured out each time eating up not only the time spent in finding the answer but the extra cost of being knocked out of flow. That said, when you think about how quickly I could have created this game had I already been familiar with Unity/C# I can see why the platform is so popular. But if you are not familiar with the platform you are using, the short timespan that a game jam gives you is not the place to be learning a tool/language if you actually want to get something released.

My overall impressions of Unity are mixed. Lets face it. Unity is very much design driven while I am more programming driven. A lot of the way to do things in Unity are not the way I would do things but the power you are getting out of the tool makes it worth using. I can see how using Unity would make sense for a number of the projects that I want to do so I expect more of my games to be created with it in the future. That said, I am still at the very early stages of learning Unity with a huge amount still to learn.