3xR Raid Rinse Repeat Postmortem

3xR Raid Rinse Repeat Postmortem

Okay. Second game jam over, first where I used an ‘serious’ game engine and not just RPG Maker.

My first foray into GMTK was a role-playing game called Alvin, the Wolf, and the Horrible Huroffs, a kind of fusion between Lost Vikings and Calvin and Hobbes, where you switched between a boy and his wolf, who ran like the wind, easily jumped streams and ponds, and ate menacing monsters for breakfast, but turned into a plush when near people. The boy, in turn, could get through through tiny gaps too small for the burly wolf, talk to other people, and rescue his wolf best friend when it was trapped in plush form.

The game performed really well, perhaps especially for an RPG Maker game. Not too many people played it, but those who did seemed to truly enjoy it. When I checked on it today and saw that someome had added it to a collection they had called Extraordinary Games, I was really, really touched❤️.

So naturally, I counted on this year’s game to do even better. Especially since I was a 'real' game engine, and I could upload it so that people could play it directly in their browser. ...Well. Insert ‘How it started/how it’s going meme’ here. As of today, a few days after the deadline, 3xR --Raid Rinse Repeat has been downloaded a grand total of… Five times.

So, let’s recap. What went right⭐?

I finished my first Unity game. Regardless of ratings, views, download counts, or anything else, this is a personal huge milestone and making 3xR was also incredibly fun. It’s a decent prototype that has the complete gameplay loop of playing the level, stopping by the shop for upgrades, rearming, and repairs, and then hitting the level again, until you've destroy all the enemies. I’ve been complimented on it being a good first try, and I’m proud of myself for getting it out there. I even dare say that even though it’s a simple, and pretty buggy, prototype, it’s still surprisingly fun to play. It’s fast-paced, has a few challenging parts, and I think the juxtaposition of my own hurriedly drawn MS Paint art next to asteroids and spacecraft from the Unity asset store is both quirky and hilarious. It’s a solid foundation to build on, and I already have several features and changes planned. I also felt I did pretty well on time management. I didn’t overextend myself, and I dropped or scaled down features that didn’t work when I realized I was spending too long trying to fix them. I submitted a working prototype of 3xR Raid Rinse Repeat with plenty of time to spare. By the way, I really like that name, too.

Also, I’m pleased with myself for my work on presentation after the upload. Fortunately, you can still edit your game page after the deadline, so I could dedicate myself to showcasing my game as well as I could. I put effort into making the game page look as good as possible and even made a six-second teaser trailer showing the gameplay loop which I think turned out pretty cool. There might be games this year with far better ideas and production quality, but do they have trailers? No, baby, that’s pretty much just me😏.

Sooo… What went less well?

Actually, not much. Overall, the things that went wrong were just the things that go wrong in every game jam. You don’t have much time, and all sorts of things refuse to work or suddenly stop working, sometimes right before deadline. I had lots of things planned for the game, but probably more than half the time went to troubleshooting things that refused to work. I thought I just had to quickly make the systems and then I’d have plenty time for level design, which is of course the fun part. Instead, I had to throw out or scale back a lot of features just to make a playable prototype, and to add insult to injury, I managed to break the pretty fun level I had built for the game and so had to cobble together something that felt a lot more ‘random’ and far less enjoyable at the last second😤.

Also, the WebGL build. I’ve basically never made a working build of a Unity game before and the WebGL build came out broken. After some attempts to fix it, with the deadline approaching fast, I had to resort to trying to build a Windows build instead. That too came with some problems that needed sorting and introduced bugs of its own (such as the missile counter showing an overflowing ‘Missiles: 0’ string instead of just ‘0’ like it did when playing the game in Unity), but at least I got it done.

What did I learn?

⌛Start earlier. I had decided to participate in the jam and was looking forward to it but spent too long just mulling over the theme and deciding what to make. I could’ve probably decided on what kind of game to make much earlier, and I would’ve had more time to actually design. I seem to recall I was kind of intimidated by using Unity, but I still should’ve started earlier.

🐑🥧I also could’ve probably eaten and slept better.

🛠️I also had no idea that putting together a playable build of a Unity project could involve so many hurdles. Next time I’ll practice that and read up on possible problems and solutions before the game jam.

💾 Oh, and I should've made regular backups of the project like I told myself to.

Either way: I had lots of fun making this and will definitely be back back next year. 3xR Raid Rinse Repeat is playable here after a quick download!