that was cool

Hello!

This is my first time making a Devlog and I don’t really know what to do here but I saw an option called Postmortem and thought that was pretty cool, so I guess I’ll just talk about Goober Flopper then.

Goober Flopper was my first successful project that I’ve actually finished so I’m pretty proud of it. I just started learning how to make games using Unity about 3-4 months ago - my first finished game without a tutorial was a disaster and I tried to participate in a game jam but didn't finish. 

I was inspired by the game I made last/last last year which is flappy bird but you are a cat and you have to shoot down viruses with pills. I was doing it with HTML, CSS and JS - it was such a pain… This year I decided to hone my 2D Unity basic skills by making that exact same game. Using Unity, I made the base game in 4 days, compared to 6 months last year! Then I decided to develop it more and add the features I wanted to add last year but didn’t have time to, and also changed the cat to a fish, the viruses to the paparazzi and the pills to the fart

What went right - I was really proud of the music, the graphics and how much I learned. The soundtrack was the first successful piece of music I’ve made in a really long time. Same thing for the graphics I’m really proud of them. I learned a lot about how to use Unity or make games in general. I found a lot of features I didn’t know like polygon collider and how to make the onClick() feature work. I also learned entirely new things like how to implement audio and how to use PlayerPrefs.

What went wrong - I had some trouble with debugging and scope. I knew debugging was very hard and very annoying. Sometimes I just had one single thing like putting < instead of >, and sometimes I got the whole idea wrong and I have to rewrite my code. It was especially annoying because my computer is deteriorating and becoming slower by the second. When I fix something I always have to recompile it when I get back to the editor, and sometimes it takes minutes to recompile. I overscoped on this project(again) but at least I improved from last time… I originally wanted to have another gamemode which is play by points and I wanted to have a tutorial, but my parents allowed me to work way less than I expected. I also wanted to make it so that the player can adjust the volume of the music and I wanted to make it so that the game saves your highest score and your last 5 plays but alas… So I scrapped the other gamemode, left the tutorial unfinished and wrote a player guide on the project page instead(I kind of winged it). Goober Flopper was also supposed to release on October 8th, but then it got delayed to October 16th, then I cut out a bunch of features and released it on the 29th.

Next time I make a game I guess I’ll have to plan it out fully before starting work on it. I had a general idea of what Goober Flopper would look like but when it got to the specifics I just went along with the flow. I’ll try to write down every feature and pseudocode every script/component. Hopefully it’s not that hard… Next time I’ll also spend more time working on the project page because I just discovered that you can use HTML for your project page which is revolutionary. Also I’ll have to convince my parents to buy me a new computer and I’ll have to somehow get myself more time to work on game development. But I think I’m on a good track!

I wrote that I’ll keep working on Goober Flopper and that’s true. It has a lot of problems and there’s a lot of improvement. Thank you to my family for all the support. Thanks to my parents for helping me and encouraging me to make games and thanks to my big sister for introducing me to game development, giving me resources and technical support. I also got a lot of much needed feedback from friends and teachers - thank you UTS! In the future I’ll be working on (not necessarily in chronological order) fixing keybinds, fixing that strange phenomenon where the game randomly gives you resources, fixing that bug where you can jump infinitely(I thought I fixed it, apparently I didn’t), making web version, adding tutorial, adding how to adjust volume of music/sound effects, adding a thing that records your high score and your last 5 plays, adding a play by points gamemode, adding more challenges, skins maybe and adding an entirely new gamemode. Wow that’s a lot of stuff!

Well in total I think Goober Flopper’s really cool and I’m really proud of it, I learned a lot of things and I hope to fix things and add new stuff to it soon. Well I guess that’s all I’ll write for today so

signing off now - bye!