Hello Flappy World

Credits

• GMTK for the excellent tutorial
• SR Studios Kerala for the bird sprites
• mk.matheusklein for the music and SFX

My first game

What game dev looked like for me

After watching GMTK’s tutorial, I decided to follow along using my weekends and evenings.

On my first evening, I simply downloaded and set up Unity. I didn’t have a lot of time, so my intention was to reduce the friction to get started for future me.

During my second evening, I set up my character, pipes, and movement. My core gameplay loop was created! Since I was brand new, this largely looked like me typing exactly what GMTK typed line-by-line. I was learning a lot about how everything worked, but there were some core concepts I didn’t understand yet, like the purpose of classes. I was having a blast AND I now had a simple game I could watch my wife play after each session 😊

For my third evening, I dedicated myself to creating the scoring & death system plus the UI. My game now felt like an actual game! This was very similar to my second evening – I learned so much but was becoming increasingly aware that I wasn’t yet understanding key fundamentals.

Then GMTK’s tutorial stopped holding my hand. He suggests a few iterations to work on like sound, animation, and bug fixes then only briefly hints at how to get started. Though this slowed my progress significantly, working through these challenges rapidly increased the pace of my learning. I was no longer being spoon-fed answers, so I had to figure out how to learn for myself! After quickly fixing some simple gameplay bugs, I spent a frustrating but ultimately cathartic session and a half figuring out how to make SFX work. The feeling of accomplishment when I finally got them to work plus feeling how much more polished they made my game seem was incredible.

I discovered the Unity Asset Store and Brackeys’ YouTube channel filled with stellar Unity tutorials. Though I was still following tutorials, I now had to figure out how to apply what I was seeing to my own game. As a result, I feel confident in my ability to work through other challenges in the future!

I spent my last 2 sessions adding difficulty scaling (without following tutorials!) and adding other polish, like a title screen. Another particularly valuable exercise I did was going back through all my assets and code to clean them up and add comments. Confidently deleting assets and lines of code was proof that my tinkering had given me a much better understanding of what I’d built.

In the end, I’m proud of what I created! I don’t feel like a game designer yet, but I am confident I could figure out how to create a prototype for many kinds of 2D games.

What I learned

• How to solve dev challenges by googling.
• Why games can take so long to build, especially when learning as you go. I’m now capable of taking on a bigger game project but I strongly suspect I’ll learn faster if I constrain my scope and focus on creating more projects.
• The value of experienced developers, expressed through 3 separate learnings:
  • The efficiency benefit of building personal libraries. For example, I created a Sound class which enabled a super clean sound manager object. Now that’s something I’ll be able to quickly re-use in all my future games.
  • The cost of changing a design decision and the value of well-architected code. For example, to increase the difficulty of my game I had to pull data from 3 different scripts which was a less efficient way to use my time. Even if I didn’t have to look up every command, a more experienced engineer would’ve been able to make this game orders of magnitude faster than me just by creating cleaner architecture.
  • The importance of math in development. Every interesting movement or difficulty increase required thinking mathematically to implement my ideas.
• How much can be learned by watching others play

What I’d change

• Difficulty: after watching my parents struggle to break 10 points (why do you press the spacebar so slow, Dad?), I’d reduce the difficulty ramp by ~25%. This is a casual game intended to be enjoyed by non-gamers so I want them to be able to get scores that “feel” high within the first 3 plays.
• Gameplay loop: thinking about my casual gamer target persona, they’re likely not so motivated by chasing a personal high score. I think they’d want to play more times if they could upgrade their character in fun ways. I’d add a currency system based upon points earned and a shop where players could purchase fun upgrades for their character. Cosmetic upgrades could include new characters, backgrounds, or animations (could I make the bird poop?). I could also consider temporary power-ups like score multipliers or temporary invincibility, but I’d want to do this without adding additional controls.
• Visuals: my title screen is the player’s first impression, and my first impression needs improvement! I’d update my title font to match the rest of the game fonts, then add excitement via animating the bird and making the clouds scroll across the screen. I’d remove the “Play” button in favor of a prompt like “press spacebar to play”.

What I plan to do next

I have an initial dream game in mind that I’d love to build which involves rhythm, cards & power ups, and narrative. That’s an ambitious project for a complete beginner so I plan to build up to it. To do that I’ll develop a couple games that will teach me the fundamentals of each of those mechanics. Here’s a tentative roadmap:

• Next: Top-down shooter/action game to learn on movement (for rhythm) and power-ups (for card design). I plan to keep this scope intentionally minimal and learn to create my own sprites and animations. My goal is to add in a novel feature that makes the game fun.
• Then: Card-based RPG designed around a strong narrative theme. I plan to try my hand at sound design so I could potentially create, or at least recognize good SFX & music. My goal is to create a memorable experience, so I’ll need to be very thoughtful about how to do this with limited time.
• Finally: Rhythm-based card game about that conveys the experience of becoming a standup comedian. My goal is for this game to be both fun and memorable to strangers.