Whisker Jam 2022 Postmortem

I made this for Whisker Jam 2022. It's finished but not to the extent I was hoping for so I'm releasing this as a demo and will continue to work on it. I was hoping for enemies but it ended up being a platform & collect things to win. Kind of challenging and I love the music! 

I had trouble with the theme mechanic the larger the project got.  I was hoping to restrict the player within the screen bounds and keep them from moving left, but I couldn't get it to work with lots of jumping, jittering and sometimes it didn't work at all :( 

I ended with a very vague concept of confronting mortality but because I had to scrap the enemies and the enemy AI for breaking my game...it's a bit harder to sell the theme.

There was a lot that went wrong, but I was able to handle it much better this time around. Brackeys was kind of a mess because I had no idea what to expect and I jumped in the night before it started which probably wasn't a great idea. Utterly breaking that game to the point Unity refused to open it was a really eye-opening experience for me and I took everything I learned from those mistakes and tried to make this game better and I think I did that. Especially considering there is NO GAME from Brackeys lol

After watching my daughter play I realized that I didn't stop you from going to far off the level and theres no way to restart the game LMAO!! Things you don't think about when you've never made a game or when the pressure is on. And I have sticky notes lol

I'm really excited about how the voxel art look turned out and I think I will be expanding on this idea in the future and fleshing it out more so that it's a cohesive and interesting experience.  I got some good practice in on things I never do like animation, audio, VFX and trying to communicate across scripts (which didn't always work) but I learned a lot and managed not to break anything this time!

As a 3D environment artist my experience with those things has just been limited to using them for localized scenes. Nothing that's a working game with so many moving parts. Big thanks to the creators that made this possible on the Unity Asset Store and Freesound.org. I'd still be using a capsule for my player without them.

This is only my second Game Jam  and the first where I actually finished a thing ! It has been an amazing and super rewarding experience. More than anything it's taught me how to let go of perfectionism and make decisions quickly!