Edgar's Adventure Immediate Post-mortem

I don't even know where to start.

As usual, I was rushing to make the submission deadline, and I had to cut most of the juiciness-features that I needed to really make this game feel great.

Failings:

• Dragged my feet when starting, losing a ton of time.
• Spent time making barrel rolling animation, that isn't even visible because of the lack of color contrast.
• Music is hard.
• Creature animations are REALLY hard.
• Bugs, bugs everywhere...
• I really wanted to add barrel explosions, score multiplier, Edgar's rotation, and maybe shadows.
• The GUI is ridiculously plain.
• Starting to submit 4 minutes before the jam closes is a really bad idea, especially when you have to turn your account into a developer account, add screen shots and a thumbnail, and a few other shenanigans before the game can be made active for the jam.

Successes:

• The game is technically finished and playable. My third public game.
• It was successfully submitted for the Indies VS PewDiePie game jam in time.
• It has animations! I haven't made pixel animations since... college?
• The art isn't too bad. Some of the best I've made, and certainly the fastest I've made.
• The music is pretty good, and not just the usual wholesale borrowing from incompetech.
• The game is surprisingly fun.

Lessons learned:

• Music and sound continue to amaze me on how vital they are for a holistic experience.
• Sound effects can be skipped if absolutely necessary, but music cannot.
• Smaller and simple pixel graphics are better than more complex ones, it just doesn't look like it when making the graphics, because I have the image blown up to the size of my monitor. Everything looks weird when magnified by 2000%.
• Stub out the game submission page first. You never know what surprises you might find.
• Take more development screenshots. It's fun to see the evolution of the game.
• Youtube is my greatest weakness.
• Game mechanics are generally the easiest thing for me to make, so front-loading my work with them is a good way to get myself invested in the project.
• I always feel great when finishing a game.
• I need to do more game jams.
• And take them seriously.

Overall it was a positive experience, albeit painful. Now it's time to find out what other people think about my game.

My Basic new Unity Project Setup

I wanted to make a little how-to guide for how I get a new Unity project up and running, mostly as a reference for my future self.

Unity3D Project

• Open up Unity and create a new project. 
• Project Location needs to be an empty folder, which is why we create the project first.
• I generally ignore the starting packages, because I make everything I need on my own.
• Save the scene as gameplay.unity into the assets folder.
• Create Resources folder and Scripts folder under Assets.
• Create Art folder in the root project directory (now know as projectDir) for all of the art project files.
• Click Assets > Sync Monodevelop Project to create the c-sharp project. 
• Use the projectname-csharp.sln when opening Visual Studio 2010 Express.

Git

• "git init" in the projectDir.
• Add .gitignore to projectDir. This tells git to ignore certain files and folders in the project. It contains the following values, each on a new line.
• Library
• Temp
• obj
• dump (something I use internally, as a place to store temp art files )

Bitbucket

• Create a new repo by clicking the create button.
• Take note of the command line directions to be able to add the remote later.

Initial Commit

• git add everything and commit.
• I use TortoiseGit as a nice and quick QUI for all my git needs.
• The .gitignore file should have removed quite a few files.
• You should be committing pretty much everything remaining in your projectDir.
• Push to Bitbucket
• Bitbucket actually gives you the git commands to add the remove origin and do the first push.
• I prefer to set up the remote in TortoiseGit.
• Remote: The name of the remote
• URL: The url to the repo (https://[user]@bitbucket.org/[user]/[project].git
• Click "add new/save"

And that's the basics of my setup when I make a new Unity project. Nothing particularly special here, just setting up Unity, C-sharp proj, .gitignore, git, and Bitbucket.