Self Reflection

Game Jam # 1: Bubble Trouble (Space Invaders Remake)

It was a good project to start off the year with since I hadn't done much coding in the summer holidays. This Game Jam challenged me to code more than I had last year. I think, I was able to learn a lot even just by writing code aimlessly. t was practice at the end of the day. After this Game Jam, I became much more proficient at using Unity and I was able to understand and fix mistakes I had encountered last year. This year, I was able to achieve a working title page and a finished game that didn't break after building it. I spent more time making sprites in this project which I enjoyed because I gave myself more time to create. To achieve time efficiency for this project, I focused on coding first, and used filler sprites in the beginning. When I knew I had a working game, I spent the rest of my time making my sprites. 

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I wanted the game to be appreciated visually too. I think I did well with time in this project, if I was more confident in coding, I would have coded the camera to have an underwater wave effect anytime the starfish would hit the mermaid. 

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Game Jam #2: RizzTender (Group collab: 10 seconds)

From the beginning, I knew our idea was going too much coding for our group to handle. But my group wanted to push forward, so push forward we did. It was unfortunate that our game was unfinished in the end. I enjoyed the art process and creating dialogue with my team mates but that's where our problem was. We spent time on creating sprites first because we just couldn't figure out how to make our game work through code. No one in our group were coders. So it was a challenge for us. We struggled with coding so much, code was passed between me and Aurelia mostly and Cathy focused on Art, in the end we did achieve small steps through code but our game was not functioning in the end.

If we had a chance to work on this together again, I would try to focus on practicing code in between working on the game because we needed a coder in our group so it was essential to know the basics of code. There were coding achievements I made in this project, like how to code a back button from the main game without affecting the game itself. This was code I was not able to achieve in my last Game Jam assignment. 

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Overall, after both game jams, I am much more comfortable using Unity, GitHub and working with team mates. In the end, I had a finished game and a non-finished one but even so, the experience that I went through will be able to help me better equip myself for future projects.