Secret Santa Game Jam 2022 Postmortem

Introduction

     Hello everyone, my name is Lawrence Alger, and I am a hobby game developer. This  postmortem is going to go over my recent project for the Secret Santa Game Jam 2022. When I first saw this game jam listed on Itch.io, I thought that it was an absolutely wonderful idea, to not only get the chance to make a game, but to make something special and personal for someone else during the holiday season. 

Project Info

    For the game jam, I was paired off with my Secret Santa Giftee who told me that they were into Fighting Games and Racing Games. This got the ideas going and my first thought was to make a small scale recreation of Twisted Metal meets Mario Kart. I thought that it would be easy for me to implement a simple AI that chases the player and fires weapons at them. This however was much more difficult than I thought. I shifted the project from being a battle arena kart racing game to an escape from the city game. To add challenge there are Turrets scattered around the city. As well as rocket pickups that the player can fire at the turrets.  

What went right?

     So let's get into what went right first. The idea of combat racing was a nice idea. I was able to use the Prometeo: Car Controller to learn about Unity's Wheel Colliders and physic engine to make a working car. The scripts were wonderfully well documented with comments in the code that allowed me to implement the code on the Simple Cars Pack from MyxerMan.  

     After learning that I was not going to be able to learn and build an AI for enemy karts to follow and attack the player, I decided that a simple turret that just tracks and shoots the player. Which was easy to implement and gave the player a challenge to keep moving. Implementing a simple way for the player and turret to damage one another was also very easy and efficient.  

     Once I had the code set for the Turrets. I moved to building up assets for surrounding city. I wanted to go for a bit of a cyberpunk feel with glowing lights and buildings. During this process I learned how to properly set up materials and make UV Texture maps. This is a very key skill for all of my future projects as it will allow me to build my own assets instead of having to rely on assets from the Unity Store. 

    Last but not least was using the Lighting system in Unity. Adding lights to the lamppost and glow to the turrets, bullets, and rockets really help to add to the feeling of the game level and aesthetic. I feel that the lighting system is very powerful and be used in a number of situations and is something I am glad that I have added to my toolbox of skills. 

What went wrong?

- AI. This is not an easy topic, even a simple AI can be a challenge to get to work. 

- The Car Controller could have been made better. I'm not sure if it was my lack of understanding of the physics of the car itself or it was because of the physics of the ground and street objects.

- The tracking on the turrets created a major problem with the rotation. Using transform.Lookat() cause serious flipping and tearing of the turret model. However, locking the rotation to a single axis caused the turret to shoot at the height of my bullet spawn point. This caused the bullets to constantly fly over the player and not register a hit. The rotation could have been done smoother as well, I was finding difficulty understanding Unity and the use of quaternion rotations. I have found some in-depth tutorials on the topic and I believe that with more studying and research I could create a smoother turret system that also has proper tracking on all three axis without tearing the model of the turret. 

- I was unable to figure out how to make certain parts of my textures and models glow in unity. I had envisioned a glowing city with windows and billboards glowing around the player. This is certainly something that I will be looking into in the future. 

- Overall I feel like I failed to give enough time and attention to the models and assets. I am unhappy with the level of quality that came out of these models. I feel that there should have been more variety to the number of buildings that I made for the level. I also wanted to make my own car model instead of using the Simple Car Pack.  Just overall, the quality of models and graphics could have had more polish. As well as the menus. 

Where will I go from here?

    While there are some areas of this project that I am not happy with, the one thing that I am incredible proud of is that I finished a project and released it. I have spent years working on game development, watching tutorials, building systems, and small scale examples, but never releasing anything. So for me this is a huge accomplishment. Moving forward I want to work more with modeling, materials, and textures. I believe that having the tools and skills to bring my aesthetics to life will give me more motivation to finish projects. I also want to spend more time learning how to build better AI for enemies so I can build better encounters and evolve the gameplay of my projects. 

     I look forward to writing more updates and postmortems for my future projects as well as writing up development blogs along the way.