This week (May 31st – June 6th) happened the Fuck This Jam online gamejam, hosted and created by the awesome dudes over at Vlambeer (Super Crate Box, Luftrauser, Ridiculous Fishing, Nuclear Throne, the awesomeness just goes on…). The point was to create a game in a genre you hate or don’t know much about and put it on itch.io. Since I already had 2 or 3 projects already running at work, I decided now was the right moment to get back into gamedev again. Fuck logic.

So yeah, I made a “RTS” game. I don’t particularly hate RTS, but it just so happens that I’ve never developed one before, mostly because my mentors where like “this is so out of fashion, facebook city builders is the shite”. It had occured to me to actually do a Clash of Clans clone or some stuff like that since I hate these kind of games. I ended up doing things a whole lot differently : a sort of defend your base against a brainless AI RTS with fixed camera, minimal graphics and no resource collection. Thus was born Strategy.min. But as a matter of fact, things went pretty wrong this week, because it seems I cannot lead 20 lives at the same time.

Late night gamedesign for !

— Julien Noble ()

So, what went right:

• I actually released, which is a thing
• I had rather solid gamedesign, but I’ll talk more about it later
• Architecture was really fine, I pushed Unity and Mono’s compiler to its limits
• I only ever used one outside asset : Share Tech Mono from Google fonts
• I suck at graphics design, and I ain’t even mad after my ugly units and buildings
• What I could do with the time I had was rather neat
• Unity export (y)

What went wrong:

• Even though I has solid GD, the current released version has almost 3/4 cut out because I didn’t have the time to do it properly. In the intended GD, I had bases, player constructions, research/upgrades and even a basic AI that was totally doable. Problem is I really didn’t get the time for that (see “what went horribly wrong”)
• Mouse management was actually a pain in the ass because my system is not flexible enough
• Architecture was fine until I realized I didn’t have the time to do everything. Then things turned ugly. Working in a prototype specialized company surely helps.
• Flight patterns for planes is rather weird and collision detection is absent
• Didn’t get time to do sfx and music :'(
• YOLO : didn’t do a single code versioning on this project

What went horribly wrong:

TIME MANAGEMENT. God I suck at this. For starters, I lost all the week end figuring out what I wanted to do, and I ended up doing game design at 1am on monday morning. Since I have a job during daytime, I had mostly reserved my evenings for code and beer. Things went right on the first night, but later on, there where spontaneous “heroic fantasy tv series” or “wassup dude, wanna hang out”. The point is, when I could have had a shitton of time to dev, I actually spent like 8 to 10 hours on the game only.

Notes to future self:

• You suck at time management
• stop wasting time on pointless details when you’re already short on it
• pizza, you’re eating too much of it

Well, things never go according to plan anyways. I’ll take the time to finish it, I really enjoyed working on it. Thanks to Vlambeer for putting up that event, it feels great to do games again. Download the game for free on Itch.io :

Have fun, code safe,

Tuxic