Oh!zone Postmortem

What went well?

Week two, game two. This week was a lot of fun and went well overall. After the massive undertaking that was last week’s game, I promised myself going into this one that I would work on scope and planning, and I did just that. When I sat down (got in the shower) to brainstorm this game, I decided on two things. One. The player would only be able to move on one axis. Two. It would be a get-as-many-points-before-dying type of game. When thinking about super simple games I had recently seen, Jacob Mills’ Radial Space Invaders came to mind and it inspired the idea of rotating the ozone layer around the Earth to protect it from space debris. I found this hilarious. It would have been funnier if I would have added the giant can of hairspray that would spray the ozone layer and increase it’s hole size for a period of time, but I decided to cut it after thinking about my goals and the fresh pain of last week’s game still in my mind.

On day one I had to help my parent’s out at Ikea, and found myself with a few hours of free time on my hands, so I went to the cafe, got out my notebook and just started writing. I thought of a good friend of mine who told me during a game jam we were working on together a few months prior, that we should plan the code out before we even opened Unity. I had no idea what he was talking about and it led to a disagreement that ultimate ended our working relationship for that game jam. Now, whether he meant actually writing out code by hand or just fleshing out general things the game would need, I’m still not 100% sure on, but I did both. I decided the game needed a Game Manager, an Earth, an Ozone, Debris and a Debris Spawner, and wrote out the general idea of what each thing would do. Then I dove into each item and wrote some pseudocode. Well, it turns out that my friend with far more experience was right. Imagine that. Lesson learned. After about 30 minutes of writing, I knew exactly where the game was heading and what the steps were to get there. I pulled out the laptop and with my remaining time at the Ikea cafe, I put together a prototype.

I came into day two feeling great. I had limited time on day one, but had already done so much. Within a few hours of starting the second day, I was done. I had a working game with the only thing missing being sound and music. Granted, it’s a very simple game, but I could have easily made it take longer without planning ahead. I’ve always been an artist who thrives on winging it, so believe me when I say that planning things out took me out of my comfort zone, and it wasn’t so bad. In fact it was very nice and something that I will do as often as I can.

Day three was music and sound. This is where I let my artistic “winging it” come out and play. I sat in front of my synths and just started making something up. The only plan I did have in mind was to have the sound effects in the game in the same key as the song. It was nothing groundbreaking, but I think from now on, I’m going to prepare better when designing the game, and save throwing caution into the wind for the music. It worked out for me on this game.

What went wrong?

I can’t say a whole lot went wrong here. Maybe expectations? I really had a good time making this and wanted some recognition for a job well done, so when I got very little feedback from some gaming communities on Reddit, I was kind of bummed. I did get a comment letting me know how inaccurate I was for suggesting that the Ozone layer protects the Earth from debris. No mention on how the Ozone layer moves independent of the Earth or how it’s rainbow colored though. It wasn’t very constructive and I just had to accept that there are just people who like to rain on parades.