Gamedev jumpstart

Well. What to say?

I dreamed about making games scince I studied at school. And 20 years later I realized that actualy why not to try.

I knew that there are two popular engines - Unity and Unreal. I knew that Unity is more friendly for beginers. And here we go. I went to their site, downloaded Unity studio and started to watch tonns of tutorials. It was a little bit boring but useful. I tried couple of "build in" tutorial projects. I ve even published some on Unity Play:

A lot of Unity tutors keep telling: "Make a small steps. Put a reachable goals". And I decided to make a small and simple game, which I will be able to handle with. And the very first idea was old USSR game "Wolf Catching Eggs" ("Ну Погоди") (actaully it is a clone from Nintendo)

And of course it was interesting to me to do as real as possible. And publishing game in a Google Store - it is a pretty real an reachable task. Quick market research showed that there are a lot of this kind of games: 

All of them was with same old graphics:

But nowadays we have such a powerfull tools for implementing any ideas you have. I don't know what is the reason for using so oldish looking graphics (nostalgy maybe). Also it is a strange solution to put a real buttons on a touchscreen display. With this thoughts I began planning.

I rember that it is really important to put a real goals. I beleave that hurriing up - it is kind of a skill. Which you can learn and which helpes with decision making and something else. From all lessons I saw I picked some basic requirements, applicable almost for every game, but especially for this game:

And I put my self a time frames: 7 days. I thought it was good enough for a such small project (it wasn't).

I put some sort of a plan on a paper - all features I need to apply:

(Maybe something is missing, especially part of registering in a tons of services and filling million of forms. )

With this plan I started with development.

Development process

Maybe it is time to tell something about myself. I am software engineer with about 10y experience and I was familiar with C# a long before I started learning Unity. I was working on the game after my daily "Office" work. COVID-19 situation "helped" a lot in this. I was not wasting time on road from/to work. And right after the end of working hours I was closing my work laptop and switching to another one. And I was spending 4-5 hours on this game till late night.  I am bad with artistic arts but good with coding. All my previous experience with games - I wrote some mods for Cryofall game, and there was no visuals at all.  This will explain next paragraph.

When I started with development - I made some screenshots from a cartoon "Nhu pogodi". I used it as a references for a Wolf character. For prototyping I made a rough cutout of a Wolf.

 And I placed an old game layout as background in Unity studio:

 Then I just downloaded free unity 2d assets pack from Unity Assets Store. And placed some sprites from it as it was on layout. Firstly it was copy-pasting and manually placing on required spots. I made an egg prefab and it was the easiest part:

 I decided to use physics for falling eggs. And use colliders in a basket and on the ground. I quickly coded basic movements, with basic collisions.  And then I started to work on a main character - Wolf. I really struggled with drawing it. It took 3 days to draw it, then fix it, then redraw it in a separate sprite parts

, 

And 2 more days took placing bones in sprites

and then animating this character. Firstly I was trying to make animations with Unity animation graphs, but it was really really bad in combining different bone animations on the same character. I know it can do it for 3D, but not for 2D. And I ve come up with something like this:

The initial idea was to make the wolf to be able to run and move his hands independently. But in the end - first he runs and then he doing moves his hands. Also it was fun for me to make his head spinning. The wolf always tracks your finger/mouse movements on a screen.

When the wolf movement was done, everything else started to move faster. I other logic of the wolf, like health and scores. Made some randon eggs generators for every chiken, made some fun chicks appearing from eggs. Made some UI:

While closing tasks one by one I was googling a lot. Almost 85% of time I was looking for a solution, and left 15% - - I was implementing it. But this was exactly what I want. I was gaining experience. I was earning knowledge points and skills to do next game a little bit faster. 

In total it was not so much code:

Work with Assets was much harder than I expected. I underestimated it. First playable version was ready in 9 days from beginning. And it was without audio and wihout UI. For audio I used some NEC-style free sounds library assets from Unity Store. For a music I took music from cartoon in episode with chikens 

(I hope it is free to use bcause it was know before this cartoon). I thought it would be fun to send player to this reference. 

 I spend some time with tweaking levels and audiosorces, but I have a few more items in a todo-list.

And then a few more days went with registering in Google Play Console, and making game's page, figuring out some settings magic in Unity and other boring stuff (is it still game development???).

After pushing game for a review then I waited for a week till it appeared in a Store. When it happenned This was the moment of truth. I made it. I was tired but satisfied. The goal was reached.

And firstly there was no downloads at all. And  I forgot about it for a week. But when people started to download it I realized, that actualy it is even not so bad. And then I ve got some useful and constructive feedback about the game. I pushed some small fixes and small updates. And in total the game was downloaded 1000+ times. And this "success" inspired my friend to put his attention on gamedev also. And I already made a list of requirements for next release version:

 Not sure that we will work on it. But who knows...

Don't be afraid of anything. If you want to do something - You only need to start.