Learn You a Game Jam Final Day devlog

So last day and it's crunch time.

I've uploaded my file and I'm ready to submit, but first I want to write down all the things I've learned over these past 10 days.

What did you want to learn going into the jam?

I started this with an idea of learning how to write a Tactics game. I knew it would be difficult, though the scope of difficulty was even more apparent as I progressed. But I have a board, and characters moving around it. I've also learned that there's a very common problem of sprites clipping into the 3D tiles from angled sprite billboarding. That's also another thing that I didn't realize was common: Sprite Billboard.

And then there was the pixel art. I had the program Aseprite since forever ago but I never really had a chance to use it. I'm not good at drawing pixel art, and it's pretty obvious from my lack of animation because just drawing the isometric views took me forever. I think with time and practice I can do better with pixel art, but this is definitely the first step. But I extremely proud because every single pixel art in my game was hand drawn by me so it's awesome to see it all in action.

What did you ACTUALLY learn?

Hoo boy, I learned a lot actually. Maybe 20% of the tutorial I did actually made it into my brain, but learning animation controllers, sprite renderers, asset creation, music implementation, while probably all easy, I'm proud of all the stuff I did. I'm a generally anxious and hesitant person - I even had to look up how to Build the game just in case I do something wrong - so putting it out there is a huge step for me.

Also, I manually typed out everything while I did tutorials and I do feel like I learned a bit from osmosis. I also took the time to understand what I was writing which is why it took me so long (I didn't even finish the tutorial on time). It got to the point where as I was adding new things outside of the tutorial, I knew exactly where to put it, and if I didn't, I could find where to put it.

How did you grow during the jam?

I feel like this is pretty much answered but I always feel like if I can look back and think: "I would totally do that differently" then I must have grown.

What resources did you use to learn during the jam?

Liquid Fire's Tactics Tutorial was the bulk of what I used, as well as the Sprite Billboard video, then there's the How to Build video. It was really unfortunate that this was the time when reddit pretty much shut down so I couldn't use a lot of the r/gamedev resources but still somehow made do! So that's what matters.

What was the most challenging part of the jam?

I was extremely busy this week. Running charity events on top of work on top of gamejamming.... I am TIRED and I am ready to sleep for the next month.

What was the most interesting part of the jam?

I think just the results and pushing myself to actually make a game. I'm ADHD so I work better with deadlines and without a deadline I just keep saying "oh I'll make something" and then put it off for the next decade, so this is the most progress I've ever made on a game in my entire life.

Closing thoughts and Would I do anything different?

Most definitely could do stuff differently now that I have more knowledge of it. First off, maybe don't start with a tactics game LOL that is not a type of game you want to go from start to finish in 10 days. Another is to keep my scope veeeery small. I technically made a lot of my goals from yesterday and I think Day 9's goals were the right amount for a gamejam scope. It was simple, only needed a few things, but still took me at least 2 days to get it all working.

Thank you for reading this far, I hope it helps... anyone haha

And thank you to the people who ran the gamejam, I appreciate you all.