How do I begin...

Sorry in advance for any typos or grammar mistakes. Not my primary language, still learning :)

Welocme, stranger.

I've never thought I would make such a progress with my game. All of my previous attempts were scrapped even before someone could play them. This one, however is basically playable. With a ton of placeholders, some minor bugs, but still playable. 

As a person who is new to gamedev I would like to list some thing that I've learned from this experience.

Searching for answers.

Many times I ran into a some kind of problem: "I have no idea how to code level transition", "Why does my code doesn't work as expected" and many others. One huge advantage of using Unity is a big amount of guides and forum threads. If there is a mechanic I want in my game - there is a tutorial on YouTube. Something doesn't work right? Look it up and you'll definitely find someone with the same problem on forum, where they got an asnwer that can be applied to your project too. And to be honest, I am really afraid that I just was lucky with my questions and usually it's not that easy to deal with them as I wrote above. I sometimes had to make desicions to scrap a script my game was using and start over, beacause the method I found was significantly more efficient and easy to use than mine, which I wrote fully by myself and had a lot of problem with. Felt kinda bad for these scripts because there were so much time and energy contributed to them. But still, the right methods from tutorials were extremely efficient so I had no choice to pick them up for my project. Speaking of these...

Plugins.

Two magor plugins I use in my project (at the moment of version alpha1.0) are "Cinemacihne" and "Ink". These were the solutions that made to to rewrite some parts of my game completely. Cinemachine redused all coding for the camera to changing some parameters of a cinemachine object. And Ink was something that I really was astonished to know about. All the writing and even dialogue branches can be created without any particular coding. I just had to make a script that is capable of reading Ink files correctly, that are responsble of the text of dialogue itself and dialogue branches. That saved me so much time and teached me a lesson to learn about other plugins that can potentially save my time... and my braincells XD

Dedication.

I often noticed how I could doing gamedev almost for the whole day. I have a feeling that dedication is important for a developer, because it's really easy to drop your project when you're stuck with some kind of a problem. It becomes tedious or even frustrating trying to fix a bug for 2+ hours. During my previous attempt there was a weird bug, that UI in a project editor worked different from how it worked in a build of a game. It wasn't related to aspect ratio or something that cannot be interacted with in a project editor but a logical mistake. Every single check i was doing to find out where things go wrong - it was all right but the very thing that was doing correclty. That's how I dropped my UE project and decided to move on to this one, that I've recently released.

In conclusion I have to say that I had such a good time making this game prototype. All those questions, every bug I had problems with was worth the feeling in the end, where I can see a properly working game, just as I wanted to.

I hope that's not the last post I make :D

hÆxXu5