Dungeon Crawler Jam 2023: Trials Of the Mage

An article by mgear    No Comments

Lessons Learned:
– Don’t use latest Unity Alpha release (encountered some bugs..)
– Do game play first! Then you have more time left to play with fun stuff (effects, code..)
– Don’t rest in the early days, i saw the event had +5 days left, so i didn’t do anything for 2 days 😮 then suddenly timer was showing 2 days left!
– Preparations would have saved +80% of the time! (pick fonts, pick sounds, music, textures.. or create basic movement scripts, spell scripts, pickup systems.. although at that point the game jam would had been just creating the gameplay, not coding : | ..)
– Use AI for story texts (chatGPT), Graphics & 2D assets (leonardo ai)
– Unity Lens flare gets blocked by objects in all layers, Except IgnoreRaycast or TransparentFX (you cannot change it to ignore other layers, so cannot place flare inside Collider on other layers..)

Unity Bugs encountered:
– 2D sprite importer, spritemode multiple is enabled by default..
– Textmesh pro, cannot generate font assets from font (had to use older unity version to generate)
– If adjusted particle noise scroll speed, unity hangs
– Moved camera down from transform numeric values, unity hangs (at least few times)
– Cannot do build n run (some Textmesh pro error)

Visual Studio Bugs:
– Selection stays in another tab, even if click on another tab text area (so if you type, text goes into that other tab, instead of the active tab!)

Here’s my entry: *Totally run out of time to make proper gameplay : |
https://itch.io/jam/dcjam2023/rate/2006720
Jam:
https://itch.io/jam/dcjam2023

Took 13 hours to complete over <8 days..

Here is compilation 13hrs into 1minute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBlTVIljF8M

Making Of – Full playlist (everything was recorded during creation)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLi5GhVWoWyw6t6SmX-4y3vbzP8UqVzTTd