Post-mortem on a 30 day game

Hi! I gave myself a 30 day deadline to build and share something and this is what came out: a fast-paced boss battle inspired by Dark Souls and Dragon Ball Z. I also wanted to share a few points about what I learned in the process:

1) Timeboxing: This happened by accident but made a huge difference. Because I only had the odd weekend day and a few evenings, I was forced to choose a small goal to accomplish in one or two hours. These goals were unrealistic at first but I got used to my pace and was able to set small, realistic goals during each session. The results were tangible and as a result my spirit in the project was kept high.

2) Starting with a finished project: At the end of every session right from day 1 I had something that you could call a finished (bad) game. You could start, win, lose and try again and the core concept was there after the first session even if it lacked depth and breadth. If something sucked, I scrapped it and I only lost an hour or two and still had the previous iteration. If it was good then I pushed it up to Unity collab and started the next phase.

3) Unity has lots of cool stuff: In the past I stayed away from a lot of the built-in unity features in favor of a C# solution and I think this has been a mistake that cost me a lot of time. In this project I made heavy use of coroutines, ScriptableObjects and Unity Events that made iterating on the bosses behaviour and vfx really easy by creating plug-and-play features for my designer-self. I also took the time upfront to understand features fully before implementing, which saved me a ton of headache debugging when it was needed.

4) I suck at making art assets: I lost a whole day to trying to pixel art. I am a decent artist when I have the time but it was much faster for me to modify something else and get things playable. In another 30 day project I plan on focusing on either pixel art or blender asset generation in order to speed this up. Until then, to give myself time to focus on gameplay, I will not be generating assets that take longer than 10 minutes to create.

5) Composition is king: Creating a lot of small, re-usable components that could be used to compose new, unplanned behaviour allowed me to take advantage of the concept of emergent design. This project started off as a galaga-clone and through combining smaller components rather than building larger behaviours I was able to find fun that I never expected to discover. I work in react-native at my day job more than anything else so borrowing concepts I've picked up there was a huge help.

I hope this brings a few minutes of entertainment to someone and I hope this tiny post-mortem might help someone else :)