What I learned after finishing YANTS

You Are Not The Slime is a game I honestly never expected to make on my first try, making something on my own. However the mini game jam gave me the perfect opportunity and I couldn't pass that up. I always wanted to learn how to do softbodies so this was a good opportunity, what followed was my first real game. Its not perfect, in fact there's a lot wrong with it, but I also am very proud of the end result and just how fun it was, both to play and to create!

So what went wrong exactly?

There's a few things, the biggest hurdle of making it was obviously the 3 day time limit, meaning that I could only really show a vertical slice of the game as that's all I would have time for. The first one was the gravity.

I was struggling to figure out how to rotate the environment around the player, when a friend offered the idea of rotating the camera instead. The problem of course is altering the gravity to make the bottom of the camera pull the player down. Changing the gravity in Unity is actually very easy, games that require the player to simply walk on the ceiling or walls is simple to do. However what I was trying to do was trying to do was allow the player to change the gravity to any angle. What I should of done was use some sin and cosine math to help determine the angles and the force of gravity, but as I didn't have a long time, what I did instead of check the angle the player was facing, then make that a percentage of what force of gravity should be applied. This means that if you angle the camera diagonally, there are two forces enacting on the player, both at 0.5 strength. Two separate perpendicular forces don't add the sum of their parts, so what I should of done is use Sin and Cosine, but had to make do with this. (It still took so long to get working just right.)

In addition the gravity was very light. I tend to struggle in unity with making the gravity pull the player down fast enough after a jump, or in this case after you rotate the camera. I find needing to really have a high gravitational force, and a really high jump force to make the jump arcs I want. I also wanted the slime to still be bouncy, and I was a little disappointed when it wasn't moreso. The first level had the gravitation force at its lowest, 9.81, but the other levels had it at 20 instead. Perhaps I should of fiddled with these numbers more in order to get a game that felt a lot better to play.

Another thing was the difficulty.

While I did have help making this game, particularly the assets and menus, the level design was all done by me. Being a Dungeon Master for TTRPG's in the past I figured I knew exactly what to do, but clearly I was mistaken to a degree. The game was hard. Too hard. I even had to make Level 3 easier. (The level 'I WANNA BE THE SLIME' was the original difficulty of level 3.) People can say that they like/want to play hard games but the truth is you want the game to be fun first and foremost. Give the player a challenge to test their skills while making the game satisfying. Fearful that I would under populate my final level, I over populated it instead, resulting in a brutally hard level that would be difficult even if you did have direct control of the slime.

I agreed that it was too hard, and decided to make some changes. In my opinion Level 3 is now a lot easier and a little gimped design wise, however my friends have mentioned that its still very hard. Its definitely something that as a designer, I have to keep in mind. Especially in a game jam where people don't want to spend 3 hours trying to beat your game when there's 100 other submissions to play and rate.

Overall I think this was a really good learning experience for me, and would like to try patching the game after the game jam voting period. Doing this means that I could, can and will make my game better, knowing that it might only be for myself. Although having a patched better game in your portfolio is never a bad thing.

If you liked my game, I encourage you to stick around! I'll be participating in more game jams in the future as well as patching and improving on games I've already worked on! You'd be helping me a lot by seeing what I can do.

Well that's enough for this post, hopefully it makes up for my short ass post when I posted the game cx Until next time!