The development process, postmortem and more!

This was yet another awesome experience at making a game in 48 hours. I wanted to share what went right and what went wrong during the process of making the game, as well as the future of it.

Overall process:

The theme was - Mixing Genres. When it was announced, I immediately thought to not only stick with 2 specific genres but perhaps 5 or even more! To achieve that, I and my team decided to pick fairly simple gameplay to start with - a simple retro pong game. The first problem that we've encountered was that we couldn't set up Unity Collab to work on our game together. So I chose the role to be the programmer and the implementer, which kind of meant less teamwork in a way, but nonetheless, we all agreed on our roles. The second problem was that I parallelly had a programming contest (ended up getting the 1st place in it - poggers).

Making a pong game was kind of a challenge at first since I haven't made one in 6 years! With the help of my teammates, I was able to kickstart the code for the ping pong game. After that, I began adding a Dance Dance Revolution-like extra minigame, which would be played simultaneously with the pong game and add the Rhythm genre to it. Then, we achieved to make a minigame that is similar to Asteroids, though all you would have to do is dodge them. One of my teammates thought it would be pretty damn cool if the ball could knock the asteroids, so that was executed too. Later, my friend Zhubanysh drew some cute little aliens and spaceships to simulate a Space Invaders-like alien shooter, and that wrapped up day one!

The next day was originally planned on adding more genres, but we more so focused on polishing. And by polishing, I mean adding astonishing effects to make up for the epic banger music that TeknoAxe made. That was really fun to make and to test. I also made 3 separate game modes - Tutorial, Easy Mode and Hard Mode, which have minor differences that don't affect the main gameplay. That took some good amount of time since some game-breaking bugs began to appear on the way of adding them. Fixing the bugs also killed some time, but at least I've managed to get rid of them. 

6 hours before the deadline, I scrapped a simple main menu, and also added an online leaderboard. Yes, this was a risk, because I had no idea if it was going to work. Last time I tried developing something like that was about 2 years ago, and nor did it work at first try. Turns out it wasn't hard whatsoever. In the end, I was really happy with the result.

And so, the game was ready to be published. I thought the WebGL version of the game would be pretty unstable, but it worked flawlessly (with the exception of the leaderboard not working).

Postmortem:

About 7 hours after publishing, the game already got a good amount of plays, and most people liked it. After reading the first comments, knowing that they were positive gave me such good relief. Believe me, making a game in 48 hours or less is madness! The rating period of Mix and Jam is still ongoing, so you can rate it until it's closed!

The game does have some bugs, and they are mentioned in the "Known bugs" section of the game's description. I recently got CSS Customization, so I gave the game page some cool effects too.

Extra notes:

I'd like to give some people a huge thank you for feedback whilst I was making and streaming the game in the voice chat of the Mix and Jam Discord server, it really motivated me during the 48 hours of the jam. Thanks to the people who actually played it too. The game will receive updates in the future, and possibly released on other platforms than PC, so stay tuned for that :)