Bell Peg - DevLog and Post Mortem

Hello everyone, hope you had a Happy Holiday and will have a Happy New Year.

Recently the Jammin Community held Toast 2021, a shorter game Jam with no prizes. Over 54 hours I went over creating my submission for the jam called Bell Peg, this is a post mortem going over the creation of the game, and reflecting on the experience.

Conception

The theme of the Jam was released, at the time everyone was stumped, we didnt know what to make a game on. I myself already started at a disadvantage because I didnt have experience in audio and I knew that whatever game I created would revolve around it in some way. So I immediately recorded "Bell" sounds in the best and only way I could, a wine glass and a finger flick.

Regardless, I didnt have a solid idea until 20 hours into the Jam when my sister gave me a few ideas, one of them being a Peggle style game..... the very same idea I had from the beginning. So I immediately jumped into unity and created the base mechanics that would make up the whole game.

Base Mechanics

The goal was to make a peggle styled game, while the original game's goal was to "hit all orange pegs", mine would be to simply hit all the bells. 

The Ball itself is actually a gameobject that has a gravityscale set to 0 with the "rotation" of a top down shooter controller that would be Instantiated if there is no ball in the scene. When the player fires the ball, the gravity scale is set to 1 with a force in the direction of the mouse relative to the ball, the Arrow used to aim is actually a child of the ball and once the ball moves, is immediately destroyed. The one thing I didnt implement was to make the ball bouncy when fired because I wasnt able to figure out how to do it. I was thinking that I had to manually implement the force applied to the ball when hit instead of applying a physics material (well we all learn).

The Bells were easy to make with a script that would play a random sound and be destroyed 2 seconds after it detects the ball hitting the bell. Its just that simple...

The gift box has a script that would move it left and right, a collider set as a trigger is placed on the box that when triggered by the ball, will add 1 to the total ball count.

Cosmetics and Audio

Once getting the base mechanics done, I went ahead on making the level areas, the UI and the levels themselves. Since christmas was around the corner I went with the typical christmas Red and Green (anybody that has ever heard the word "christmas" should know what it is) and finalise with level design and menu systems.

And then came Audio, I really didnt want to have none but this time I wanted to implement a volume slider because the bell sounds were, lets say at minimal, DEAFENING! I managed to get it done with 15 minutes left.

Or so I thought....

The rushed 15 minutes

I opened the final export of the game to see that the UI wasnt properly scaling, this was a mistake I wanted to avoid with the first 2 games I made previously on itch. So for 13 minutes I researched how to scale the UI, attempted to scale the UI, and do it all over until I finally got it to scale properly, Zipped up the file, setup the Itch page, and finally submitted the game with just over 2 minutes to spare.

Post Jam

Right after the Jam I went to work to create "Free Play", a gamemode I wanted to implement where you can practice shots. It took me a while to make the random generator but, I managed to make it work. Essentially theres a counter that checks for all the bells. Anytime a bell is destroyed, it will automatically generate a new bell. While it isnt perfect as bells overlap, I was satisfied as this was the game I wanted to submit for Toast 2021. DeeRaghooGames suggested to make the game Android compatible and while I as making great progress, Unity decided the SDK and JDK it installed werent good enough, so im dropping the Android build. FOR NOW

Conclusions

Toast 2021 was taxing on everyone's time but it shows how far all of us has come as Indie GameDevs as what we all previously accomplished in 1 week was accomplished in 54 hours with extra features. I hope to increase my skills, see the community grow and to participate in the anticipated Jammin 2022.

I hope everyone has a good day, and have a Happy New Year.