#1GAM 2014 up until now
For #1GAM I set two goals. The first is to have fun and the second is to learn Unity3d. Up until now I have met both goals. The one thing I did not want was for #1GAM to become tedious. So I worked for a maximum of 5 days a month on my entries. In those 15 days I started to work on a framework on top of Unity for creating platform games. The last two months I would iterate on what I wrote the previous month, instead of rewriting everything again each month. Still drawing in the GIMP took most of my time during those 15 days.
The first month I wanted to make a basic platformer with a trigger and a player could attack and jump. The code was a mess, but I had to learn a few lessons about Unity and physics. The biggest lesson I learned was to use edge colliders for tiles so the polygon collider won’t start to jump around when moving over a row of 1000 tiles or get stuck for no reason.
In February I made a really hard game to finish. It is finishable, but even I can not finish my own creation. I did had fun making it. I also added a library to keep statistics about people playing my game and how well they did. The numbers do tell me I made a really hard game to finish. The code had been refactored just a little bit. I learned about sorting layers, because I had a Z-buffering problem.
For the March entry I made a Mario like game. It was an easy entry to finish. The biggest changes were in the code. I restructured it. The code is more suitable for experimentation and adding new types of tiles, enemies or player characters. The level layout is new defined in a JSON file instead of in a scene. Working on a new level and getting feedback is really fast now. I just reload the scene to see the result of the changes to the JSON on screen. There are still some issues with this entry I did not fix. Most of these issues are related to physics. I only had some basic knowledge of the physics within Unity by the time I finished the March entry. The motion of the jump made by the player is not really great. Also if the player is standing next to a wall and jumps, the jump stops too early. Another issue is the collision between the player and the enemy. If the player lands just a bit off the collision would be deathly for the player. There is still much room for improvements for the April entry. What I learned from this entry is to make reloading changes as fast as possible so you can iterate faster.
For the April entry I already fixed the issues I found in the March entry. I have been working much longer on the April entry then I planned for, but it is still fun. I asked Dick Poelen if he wanted to work on an #1GAM entry with me and he agreed. Dick can draw great pixel art and is making a cool game called World War Whale. He drawn and animated a hero, enemy and tile for the April entry. He also has some great idea I want to explore further with him and made those ideas into an #1GAM entry. Also I gotten honest feedback from Dick Poelen and working with him is a great motivation to do more great things for #1GAM.