Wow, what a ride!

This is a post-mortem for the 7DRL. Some small learnigns and problems that I had during the development and I hope that these learnings might be of good use to people.

I started the development on sunday around 11 and submitted it at Sunday night at 01(ish). There definitely have been ups and downs during the jam, it really helps to have a week to develop instead of just 24 or 48 hours as most other gamejams, it gives you time to give proper thoughts to the decisions that gets made.

Problems during the jam

• Unity colliders are not reliant enough to make a grid-based system. 
  • Even if you in the same frame move an object and check the position of it using a checkbox or overlapbox the objects collider might've not moved during that frame, leading to enemies and players taking decisions on wrong information (walking into each other etc)
• Writing a "proper" grid-system
  • Beause of the Unity-collision-problems I lost 3 nights/mornings trying to figure out why collisions didn't work and eventually re-wrote the entire "game-brain" to get it to work properly, I'm very happy with the result in the end (no bugs! I think :P ), but it took away a lt of time from making more features.
• Polish takes double the amount of time you think
  • Not really a problem, since I still had time to do polish and feedback, but my goal was to be finished by 21 (9 pm) but ended up finishing at 1 am instead.

Good stuff/learnings that I did

• Focused on the full game-loop before anything else
  • On monday, I already had a complete game, it had a win-state, lose-state, menus etc. But without polish. By doing this I always felt very calm because I knew that if something came up, I would still be able to submitting something finished.
• Kept the scope low
  • Beause of the above statement, every new feature that I added didn't break the game or stop the development, for every new feature that I put in, I didn't continue on the next one until the current one was completely finished with proper feedback and completely bug-free.
• Trello / Discipline
  • I set up a Trello-board for the jam that I used through-out the week to keep track of my progress and make sure that I didn't loose track of what I was doing. I set up 3 "sprints" with increasing scope and features. The first sprint was mainly to get all core-systems in place (attacking, health, simple procedural generation, win-state, lose-state) and I didn't move on to the next "sprint" until I felt completely finished with the current sprint. So when I entered "Sprint 2" on thursday the game was already in a solid state with feedback and polish but just missing features.
• No bugs-rule
  • I decided for myself that I would not tolerate any bugs at all, this really helped the game to feel properly polished and made sure that it felt as a complete game instead of an un-complete game with half-implemented features.
• Doodle Studio 95
  • I bought a program called Doodle Studio 95, which is a drawing-plugin to use inside of Unity, this made graphics a breeze to make and helped me to focus more on the design/development of the game since graphics/feedback and FX were so fast to implement.

Overall I'm super proud of the result and will definitely join 7DRL next year.

TLDR: Don't use Unity-colliders to make a grid-system, make a proper grid with arrays, use Trello, do not allow bugs, stay disciplined, do art with Doodle Studio 95.