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[yousayrandy]

GAME COMPLETE! Play it here:

Swap Afloat

A One-Touch Action Puzzle Game

Post-Development Reflection

This is the DevLog for the 6th (for the month of June) in a series of game jam submissions for a challenge I gave myself to complete a game jam every month of 2022. You can find the previous DevLogs (with the exception of January) here:

February: Stress CUPacity
March: Rescue Matters
April: Plugging In Simulator
May: In Corporeal

Introduction:

Post Development Reflection?: For the month of May, instead of doing a DevLog simultaneously with the development of my game jam submission, I decided to focus all of my efforts on creating my game. If you read my May DevLog (link above), you will see it was a resounding success. I am continuing that trend for June, and this is a reflection on the development for this game.

Who am I?: My name is Randy, a hobbyist game developer. You can find my introductory post at: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=45.11660 I am not the most experienced of game developers, but I've dabbled enough to be able to (hopefully) complete this simple game I'm trying to make.

Why are you doing this?: Because I hate myself. Kidding! I love gaming, I've loved making them, and I want to keep doing it and get better at it. I am also fulfilling a promise to myself to complete a game jam every month for the year of 2022, and this game is February's contribution. I am documenting this process to help myself and others with the whole learning game development thing.

Both Morale and Exhaustion were High:

Since the posting of the May DevLog (link above), the May game jam I contributed to concluded and the rankings were revealed. I was getting a consensus that my game was good, so I suspected I'd rank decently high. I also knew there was something to that game, so after I saw 950 games were submitted, I was expecting at least top 100, which I would have been very proud of.

In Corporeal, the game I made in among the darkest time in my life in very little time, ranked 11th overall out of 950 submissions. I could not believe and I was over-the-moon happy. I felt completely justified in what I was trying to do, and it undid basically all of the damage that happened to me between April and May of this year. I don't have words to describe the feeling, but it was the most positive I've been in ages.

That said, the emotional rollercoaster I've been on since spring, with its highs and lows, really took its physical and emotional toll on me. I needed a break for June. I was looking around for easier or shorter jams, and didn't find that many that appealed to me, but I signed up at the last possible minute to Geo Jam 2022, which lasted for three days.

My Prep for the Jam:

I knew I wasn't going to be able to live up to my performance for May, so I quickly squashed my expectations. I needed a recovery month, but I am also committed to this challenge, so I just needed something to check the box of completing a jam without feeling like I was phoning it in. I did not want, however, to burn myself out by cramming in as many hours as possible into making a game. With In Corporeal, my mission was to make every little bit matter to add to the overall experience. The opposite was true for this next jam. Minimal graphics, no sound, barely a menu. I just didn't have it in me to care about that stuff. In addition, I'm busy and have a family to care for, so my jam sessions (heh) are delegated to very small fits and spurts, so I knew I was only going to have a handful of hours at best to make this game.

Concepting the Game:

Ironically, the jam in which I was the least interested in contributing to had a theme that made me come up with the game the fastest by far. The theme was "Pick a Side," and I instantly thought about an endless runner of sorts where you swap from side to side to avoid obstacles. I truly have no idea what this idea was inspired by. I know it's been done before, but I can't point to any single thing like I normally can. The original plan was to have a cool contrasting color aesthetic, with the sides having opposite colors, but I just didn't have the time. With the idea in mind, I set to work on the night of the first day.

Development:

The common theme of these DevLogs is "I'm way better at this than I think I am." I had a vague vision of what this thing would look like, I was able to code it. I ran into the issues I expected I would, and I solved them fairly quickly. I am moving around the Unity engine like I own the thing, and I am becoming very comfortable in coding in C#. I was able to get the basics of the game up and running in under an hour on the first night, and polish it out within the next hour. That was enough to satisfy me, so I went to bed early.

As I mentioned, I didn't want to burn myself out or sacrifice time with my family, so I didn't touch the game again until the following night after the kids went to sleep. I worked on it for another two hours, and I got the code completely done. The engine worked -- a little wonky, but functional. Basically, I had a ball that the player would control by clicking/tapping the screen to swap from one side of the screen to the other. Layouts (I called them obstacles in my code) would slowly fall from the screen, and you had to swap to make sure you got out of the way. If you didn't, it would push you down. If you got pushed to the edge of the screen, you would lose. I did this by creating a spawner object above the screen and created "layouts" as prefabs and had them spawn randomly from an array in the spawner object. This limited my capabilities, but worked fairly well. After implementing this and ironing out the physics a bit, I went to bed early again.

The following day I needed to finish it early, so with the code in place, I just needed to add new layouts, add a start screen, a lose condition, and a rudimentary difficulty system. The layouts were fine -- I wish I could've made more or more interesting ones. For whatever reason, I was stupid and lazy on the start screen. I hid all of the menu objects under a parent that I set inactive after the game starts, and had a different parent set active after game over. Simple, but I could've just restarted the scene, but for whatever reason I didn't think of that at the time. Lose condition was a basic collider, so no issues there. The difficulty system came a lot easier than I thought it would. I had the game set up to set the descend speed of the layouts as soon as they spawn, and then have the layouts destroy themselves as they leave the screen. From there, I just told the game to increase the speed slightly after the layout destroyed itself, which ended up working out fine.

And with that, I was basically out of time to work on it. I was busy the rest of the day and the deadline was the following morning, so I gave up trying to do anything else to it and submitted it.

Lessons Learned and Final Thoughts:

At the time of this writing, I have two positive comments on the game already. I think they're being generous, because there is plenty wrong with it and it's not very deep at the moment. That said, it's very functional, and the fact that I was able to pull this thing out in probably a total of six hours of development time just proves to me how far I've come as a developer. There's no way I would have been able to do this even in quadruple the time I spent on it back in January, so this was a success in continuing to further my confidence and motivation. It's also not a terrible game, and I think I might want to revisit it with a lot of other design ideas I have for it.

I'm happy with how this turned out and I hope this experience has refreshed me enough to kill it in July like I did for June. Thanks for reading!

-Randy Fluharty