My First Attempt at Making a Game

Before making this game, I had previous experience trying to learn and understand how unity works and how game engines function. But, I never had the confidence to follow the final advice/tip from every tutorial ever whether it was Brackey's or Blackthornprod or Goodgis or Dafluffypotato or Mr Milk Man himself Dani and so many more wonderful game devs I look up to. They all had one piece of advice in common: to begin making games. No matter how the game comes out and how successful or terrible it is you still make games. In many cases, they would even tell you if you have any issues with time and feel like you won't finish any game you start. Enter game jams they decide the theme for you and it also has a strict schedule to be followed so it gives you boundaries.

One day I just woke up and decide to look through Itch.io's game jams pages and see if there are any joinable game jams at the time. Luckily Itch.io has a wonderful community that always has game jams of various sizes throughout the year. At first, I was thinking of joining one of the big game jams, but anxiety hit and I said let's start small and gradually get there. Of course, it's not bad to start small it is a normal thing in almost all topics. 

So, I found a game jam that had around 40 people in total but only 12 were actually participating. I felt 40 judges in total and only 12 are going to be up against me I felt that I wouldn't be pressuring myself to go against a massive crowd and put myself out there when I don't have the most experience. My first step was to buckle up and begin, but I didn't. For some reason, I got occupied with other things that weren't crucial and forgot about the game jam. So when others had a good week to work on their games and art and whatever they wish to add. I only had 2.5 days to work on it. Which for me was a small amount of time, because every previous time I ran a test at a game concept or game mechanic while learning the ropes of indie game dev it took me months to make decent progress. So it was a massive jump for me. But, I remember being on Discord with friends and thinking to myself it's now or never and I just left the game we were playing and began working on the game while on call. 

As of that moment I was hardwired to focus only on the game and to get it done. You might think that 2.5 days is actually enough but for the theme (simple shooting game)  it wasn't. Yes, it did say simple, but in truth, I've never done a shooting game before. I still had the determination to get through it and I did. For example, I did make a similar concept where a projectile would be shot and I had a couple of methods to do so either using actual game objects that would get sent in a certain direction or I could use raycasting. Which I did not even know anything about. Luckily I took the same concept before and used the game objects as bullets, but now I needed to make it so that the projectile would be sent in the direction the player was facing. Which was surprisingly easy. All that was needed to be done was to make the firing point a child of the player, meaning that when the player moves the firing point would move with it in the same position relative to the player. Like that, I was able to make the shooting mechanic. Next was to make the player look towards the mouse in the game. This actually had a decent amount of math behind it that I struggled with for a bit. One thing that I truly love is math. Although I might not be the best at it I still do enjoy it completely and love to learn about it on my own time. Even when I ran into obstacles such as this I still tried to enjoy my time while working on them.

If I would have to say what was the toughest thing that I ran into. It would probably be the creativity aspect of game dev. Like the UI design and the art for the game which I did all by myself. I love art and have been trying to get better at it, but I am still a beginner at it. So, it takes me time to make a very nice design that would be considered attractive and work with the game. Overall, the experience was worth it and I believe it gave me the confidence to make more games; since I got 2nd place out of the 12 participants. That rank was a massive confidence booster that I needed. My advice for newcomers like myself would be to just make the first game even if it turns out terrible upload it. Because, while it might be bad you still might get good feedback that helps you get a better understanding of your weaknesses and your strengths. I would recommend doing that with a time limit, as it helps you make faster decisions, work better under pressure, and also finish the game.