PigArmy development - 0

Hi, I'm Mathias, a programmer who loves video games. For some time now I've been wanting to try to make a full game with Unity, since I work with the engine to develop engineering/simulation projects.

PigArmy is a game that was developed in 10 days for the Learn You a Game Jam: Pixels Edition, whose theme was "You are the Monster". In it you control a wolf, and your goal is to bring down the pigs' buildings with your powerful blow.

This was not my first attempt to make a game actually, I made a mini game to propose to my girlfriend last year. But I couldn't even call it a game, it was very simple and only she played it. However, it served its purpose, she accepted and today we are married.

Although it was not my first attempt to make a game, this was my first Game Jam, as well as my first experience with pixel art sprites and animations. I used LibreSprite to make them.

This was also my first attempt at composing music. I used the BeepBox site (https://www.beepbox.co) for that.

I joined the Jam to learn more about game development and to test if I was able to create a complete game, practically by myself. Of course I had help on this journey, my wife helped me by giving her opinion and there were also some very useful tutorials, like "The right way to pause a game in Unity" from "Game Dev Beginer" (https://youtu.be/ROwsdftEGF0) which taught me how to pause the game, and the videos "Learn how to create a Typewriter Effect for Text Mesh Pro in Unity" and "Sprites inside your text boxes! How to use sprites in Unity Text Mesh Pro" from the "Christina Creates Games" channel, which helped me create the game's story and tutorial texts (videos available here: https://youtu.be/UR_Rh0c4gbY and https://youtu.be/gJt6vSSlG3I, respectively).

In addition to these learnings, I was able to improve my knowledge in programming, especially regarding events in Unity. There was a lot of bugs when resetting the scene, mostly Missing Reference Exceptions. I discovered they were caused if I don't unsubscribe the events when disabling the Game Objects as I was subscribing again to the same events every time the scene was reloaded.

For the development of the game I used several resources, including software, unity assets, fonts and websites.

List of resources:

• Software:
• Unity, for developing the game
• Visual Studio, for coding
• LibreSprite, for drawing pixel art and making animations
• Audacity, for editing my audio
• Github Desktop, for version control
• Unity Assets:
• AA 3D Low Poly Nature Pack - AHMET ALP (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/aa-3d-low-poly-nature-pack-227820)
• Monsters Ultimate Pack 02 Cute Series - Meshtint Studio (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/creatures/monsters-ultimate-pack-02-cute-series-179083)
• ProPixelizer - ElliotB256 (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/propixelizer-177877)
• Worn wooden crate - Hocker (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/furniture/worn-wooden-crate-246735)
• Fonts:
• Alkhemikal by jeti (https://www.dafont.com/pt/alkhemikal.font?fpp=200)
• Websites:
• Pinterest, for inspirations
• Milanote, for designing my game
• BeepBox, for composing music
• Youtube, for tutorials
• SFXR (https://sfxr.me), for sound effects

The most challenging part was sticking to the initial scope of the project. Throughout the development I kept coming up with new ideas, adding to the document I had created in Milanote with the initial ideas for the game. But more ideas meant less time to implement everything. In the end I had to put some of them aside, but I really intend to continue the project as soon as possible, adding new levels and new types of pigs, and then reveal the outcome of the story to the players. So wait for updates...