Game Jam Postmortem

Thought of doing a postmortem which usually helps to see a big picture and upgrade, here it goes...

As many joined the Brackeys Game Jam for this year.  I too joined in a hope to learn Godot 3d and complete a game .

First comes the theme "Let there be Chaos".. it is awesome one more possibilities from this one.  So on thinking more sorted down to 4 ideas.

Mostly want to develop a game to learn Godot (3D part of the engine ) and based on marbles.  Hence chosen a version of this game idea. Clear the path for the marbles. Obviously for the game jam had only limited time to work and so completed only one marble instead of many marbles. But it is fun.

A lot of time spent on learning and the progress is good until in the middle planned to change the art asset/ scene files names etc and that lead to a corrupted scene file which works fine in desktop + editor. But not working in web, which is my main target platform for the jam. And the error was it is not loading the textures in the materials. Finally after a day struggling fixed this one.

Then comes the huge issue of low FPS in android. Tested the game in my mobile fps is almost 15 - 20 and not many items added yet to the level.  First used the gridmap in the Godot to create the level easily and thought that might be the issue also it have some  rotational constraints which might be a problem for advanced levels. After a lot of work nothing can be done to improve fps.

Solution is move to Unity.. so downloaded the latest version.. OMG unity editor is so slow, which was once my fav engine. Now build times are very long for even hypercasual games. Anyways did a fast prototype and took a android build ( almost @#@##@# 29 minutes long). And tested for fps and others but it is better but not reaching 60 fps. Which was my target as wanted to add more physics too..

Days fly with these errors..  so reduced game idea the physics and level creation part and instead move them via path nodes. after this hoped to finish the game. Generated basic level and exported to json. and added advanced levels manually.. Yep planned to work on the procedural generation. But this worked for the jam. 

Then comes handling of level rotation issue, As every  tile is not a simple tile, it is a grid it self.. so mapping mini grid to level grid becomes big issue.. Solved that using separate 2d arrays for items, starting rotation , solution. A class, dictionaries in GDScript language to read and hold the data.

Finally added some 5 levels and UI flows for the submission.