SumNeighbours

SumNeighbours is the result of a couple months worth of weekends of design and tech planning.  The ultimate goal of the project was to work through the entire development process starting with paper prototypes to publication within a self-imposed timeline.  Gameplay started as a variant of sudoku and was created over a couple of days with  help from friends and family play tests.

I'm quite happy with the way this turned out.

Some things I learned over the course of the project:

1) Build all systems so they can operate independently.  The structure of this project allows me to change nearly anything without impacting other systems.  Most UI, audio and art/animation can be altered without the need for any programming work.  In a team environment I can see this being invaluable but even on my own it was a dream to work in.

2) Lean on Unity (the engine and the service) every chance you get.  All of the more challenging problems for me were solved quite quickly after a little bit of research.  Cinemachine made the camera work quite easy.  Unity Ads was a breeze to implement and the asset store gave me Easy Save which is used to track player progress.

3) Once you find something you are happy with try a few more things anyways.  The process of iteration on this project lead to some great experience improvements.  I realize the game isn't going to win any awards but there are parts that are orders of magnitude better than what I was originally going to publish just because I did the extra hour of research or exploration here and there.