Post Mortem - Buzzy Bee
Created: Friday, 20-Oct-17 14:37:45 UTC
BuzzyBee was my entry for the Weekly Game Jam - Week 14 on Itch.io, The theme of the jam was Bees.
Things that went well
Expandable Concept
One of the things I like most about BuzzyBee is the fact it’s an expandable concept. It’s a good barebones game and has a lot of room for expansion if people so desire (I like the idea personally of expanding BuzzyBee into a full release). I could add new obstacles, new enemy types, redo the art, fix the bugs, port to mobile, etc and there’s so much I could work on without changing the core gameplay.
Picking up the Engine
I made the game in Unity. Having not used Unity in about 6 months and not being great with the engine, I forgot most of the key words and the structure of C# code. Making a gamejam game in 2 days (I entered late) is no easy task when you’re also trying to remember and find out what functions you need, in order to programme the game correctly.
Maintainable Code
Having only really used Unity when I had little to no programming knowledge, and less of a knowledge of the game engine itself, most previous Unity projects have poorly written code that I find hard to maintain 6 months down the line if I’m picking it up again, but I believe I wrote and structured my code better so hopefully it would be better to work on and improve at a later date.
Things that went poorly
Lack of variety
One of the issues I have with this project is the fact its lack of variety makes it very dull to play after the first few attempts. Nothing really changes. There’s only one enemy, and 2 obstacles and so once you’ve played it for a few minutes, there’s nothing unique there apart from trying to achieve a new high score. Then again, you could argue the same with copter and flappy bird. Although I did feel like it was easier to get into a successful rhythm in this game than the other two were.
Bugs
So one of the main issues with game jam games is the amount of bugs included due to the lack of time to polish the games. This game had a major issue in one bug that involved creating obstacles that would continually generate. For some reason every time I tried to run the project the amount I would need to increase this one object by would change and in the end would result in it getting further and further down the screen until it becomes avoidable.I never found out what the source is, and I think it’s related to my lack of knowledge of the Unity Game Engine.
Tags: Game-Jams