Tag: unity game development

How I Inducted my Brother into Game Development and His First Ever Game Jam

Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes

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I am the youngest of four dudes, and my closest accomplice among them is the third one who is just one year older than me. Suffice to say, he has been my partner-in-crime ever since we were kids. We are both gamers at heart, with him being “way more of a gamer” than me. He plays a lot of games across multiple platforms. I, on the other hand, only play a couple that I actually like (and test some games for like an hour just to see what’s up).

Career-wise, we chose very different paths – I pursued game development; and, he got jobs from working in the government as a facilitator for recovering drug addicts, to working as a technical support for a Fortune 500 company. His last job was stable compared to the indie life I’ve been doing for almost a decade now. But, unfortunately, it’s also the most stressed he’d been in the recent years. That said, he wanted nothing else but to get out of there.

I’ve been trying to convince him to try out game development for years now, because I believe his talents and vast knowledge of video games, are great assets that’ll help him in the industry. During one of our family dinners just this last holiday 2022, I opened the idea again – the idea of him trying out game design, and this time, he agreed.

To be honest, I was probably more excited than him. I gifted him two Udemy courses last December 27, 2022 – The Psychology of Games – Secrets of Good Game Design; and, Code Monkey’s Make Games Without Code? Master Visual Scripting in Unity!

As you can see in the courses above, there are no programming involved. He tried almost two years of Computer Science in college, and it just didn’t work out for him. I didn’t want to bring him back to those dark days, so I bought courses about game design and visual scripting instead.

He started right away with the game design course until the New Years, when we rested for the holidays and spent time with our family. But, after the that, he went to work.

January 1, 2023 – he started Code Monkey’s visual scripting course in Unity. I’ve been watching Code Monkey‘s YouTube videos ever since Brackeys retired. So, I was confident that his course will help my brother get started with game development using Unity. But, we quickly realized that the course was slightly out-of-date.

Don’t get me wrong, the concepts discussed in the course are still usable today, but the buttons and the interface are different already. In Unity’s language, even the packages and versions are different. This might not be difficult for intermediate to experienced Unity developers, but the different interface and terminologies are very confusing for a first-timer.

That said, I searched around Udemy again for a more up-to-date visual scripting course that uses at least Unity 2021 LTS (Long-term Support) and the built-in visual scripting package. Luckily I found GameDev.tv Team and Taryn McMillan’s Unity Visual Scripting: Learn Game Coding The Easy Way.

Taryn McMillan’s course is exactly what works for my brother – concise explanation that shows which button to click and where it is in the interface; and, based on my brother, the exercises after each lesson helps a lot in putting what he learned into practice.

I agree with this kind of learning (exercises after each lesson) as it prevents the trivial way of learning game engines – which is to just follow along a tutorial without understanding what you’re doing. Here are good videos by Andrzej Gieralt Creative and Game Maker’s Toolkit discussing this way of learning game development.

In any case, my brother played around Unity and finished Taryn’s visual scripting course. At this point, my brother created a simple game where you control a bacteria-like character with collision around a map; and a simple 3D archery game, complete with scoring and restarting the stage. He is doing well so far; but for me, there is still one thing he needs to experience to fully indoctrinate him to game development – game jams.

Luckily, Ludum Dare 52 was just a couple of days away and it was a good opportunity to throw him in the lava pit right after learning the basics of visual scripting in Unity. **evil laughter**

Kidding aside, here were my goals going into the game jam with my brother:

  • Teach him how to write a Game Design Document (GDD)
  • Teach him how to use version control software (we used GitHub and Fork)
  • Teach him game design and balancing concepts
  • Make him experience game development, from brainstorming to releasing a game
  • Make him experience crunch so he’ll never want to experience it again in game studios (half joke)

January 7, 2023, 3:40 PM – we did not start off on the right foot – WE WERE ALMOST 12 HOURS LATE!

Because I forgot how time zones work. I thought the timer in the Ludum Dare website was Pacific Standard Time (PST), that makes the 8AM start time would be around 8PM here in the Philippines. But, apparently, the website synchronizes to the device’s time zone. Meaning, the “PST” on the website was actually Philippine Standard Time. Oh. My. God.

In any case, we wasted no time, gathered our devices, prepared a table for our junk foods, and started brainstorming game ideas for the jam’s theme, “Harvest”.

We gave ourselves one hour to go wild with ideas – just right them down, drain our brains of mechanics and features no matter how crazy they were; then after an hour, we deliberate and remove ideas that seem impossible in the 60 hours that we have. Here are some of the ideas we had during the brainstorming phase:

  • A game similar to Stacklands where you manage a farm using cards
  • A village management game similar to Breath of Fire 3‘s faery village, where you manage faeries and even turn some of them into faery dust if their stats are too low
  • Poop (because poop is always funny) harvester where the player harvests different types of animal poops, each with different prices
  • A game where you play as a Valkyrie harvesting souls for the upcoming Ragnarok
  • and many more…

We ranked these ideas using Google Sheets where we had columns for Pros, Cons, and a 0-10 rating on how much we are willing to die for the idea. I got this from Ryan Sumo of Squeaky Wheel, it’s something we used to do when thinking of features for Academia: School Simulator.

During the process, most of these ideas were scrapped either because we didn’t feel that strong about the idea, or because we thought it’ll take the whole month to finish the game. During the discussion, we introduced the idea of having a dice for randomization since we both love Dungeons & Dragons; and to mix that dice mechanic with the village management from Breath of Fire 3. To further simplify the gameplay, there’s only one control – drag and drop (which later turned into just button clicking).

At the time, we didn’t know we’re making a management game but in hindsight, it worked well because we played to our strength – I mostly made management/simulation games in the past, and he also played a vast amount of games in those genres.

After brainstorming, we went to work – I started making a quick prototype on Unity, and he started working on Game Design Documents for each feature. We guided each other throughout our process to make sure I’m implementing his vision of the game properly, and I’m making sure he won’t go crazy on the GDDs and start feature creeping.

During the development, I also worked on different editors (with the help of Odin Inspector) for him to edit game variables for balancing and adding content, such as events, to the game. My brother also volunteered to work on the different UI panels for the game, as I got stuck in the events system during the second day. Plus, my computer decided to act up. Thank you, Murphy’s Law.

Here’s my brother working on different UI interfaces.

Still working on the game’s UI with a sneak peek on the initial title of the game.

January 10, 2023, 2:38 AM – less than 2 hours into the end of the jam, we finished and submitted “Dice Wheat Me” to Ludum Dare’s website and to my brother’s Itch.io. Here’s my brother looking at his page after setting it up. We are heavily sleep-deprived at this point.

Then, we both went to sleep.

The next day came and we both felt somewhat rested, we checked the feedback on his first ever game on his first ever game jam, and – boy oh boy – the comments and reception were very positive!

Now, I can’t stop myself from comparing my brother’s first experience with my first game in Newgrounds last 2008, where a person used all of the available characters in the comments to fill up the box with “F*ck You!”…and did it twice.

In any case, I’m glad my brother’s first game was received this well. A Twitch streamer called jitspoe even played the game on stream and gave my brother some advice on what to expect as a new guy in the industry.

Here are some of the comments on his Ludum Dare page:

A player even reached Year 9 in the game!

There are still a couple more days before the voting ends. If you want to try the game, here are the links – Ludum Dare and Itch.io.

[EDIT March 7, 2023]

Here’s my brother’s overall results, out of 1649 entries. Honestly, not bad for a first game jam! If you’re interested he made a LinkedIn post expressing his excitement for the next Ludum Dare.

More Comments:

[/EDIT]

This whole venture has been a success not only for my brother turning his idea into his first game, but also for me seeing if I can teach game development to someone who has zero experience with the discipline. That said, there’s one lesson I keep going back to and I think would change this whole experience if I approached it differently – hand-holding, or whether I did too much of it.

Let me explain. Throughout my brother’s learning process, I always emphasized making simple games such as a Flappy Bird clone, or an endless runner. I believed that would further enhance his familiarity with Unity and with visual scripting. But, at the same time, I also wanted him to make a game that he wants to play.

I’m afraid that, given the time constraint, I took up most of the programming and left all the design decisions to him. Now, the good thing about that was, he was able to flex his game design muscles making Game Design Documents, and even using tools such as Google Sheets to list and balance events in the game. But, I felt like I took away his opportunity to learn Unity and/or apply his visual scripting knowledge during the jam. Yes, he worked on UI canvases, panels, and sprites in Unity, but he didn’t use any of the visual scripting knowledge he learned in the Udemy courses. That said, in our next jam, I’m letting go of some of the mechanics implementation, to give him an opportunity to use visual scripting on an actual project.

That’s it! This whole experience was fun from the get-go, and I would like to hear what you think – how would you introduce someone to game development? would you use online courses? do you think I did a lot of hand-holding during the process?

Let me know in the comments below or you can reach me out on Twitter.

Have a good one, and stay safe!