(Last in a series. You’ll probably want to check out Part One, Part Two and Three first.)

Yay, more things going wrong!

So now I’m going to go into more things going wrong with our Global Game Jam entry, specifically the sort where I was doing things I’d never done before.

Level Loading

Marie and I always talked about our game as being something with multiple levels. And yet, it didn’t occur to me until I started implementing level switching that I realized I’d never done anything with multiple levels before — most importantly, I didn’t know how to persist information (in this case, what item you’d picked up previously) from level to level.

I think the proper way to do this is with SerializedObjects in Unity… but that’s not what I did; I didn’t know about those during the jam. Instead, I made it so the player object wasn’t destroyed on level load.

It was a hacky solution, but it worked.

If I were doing this on my own, I probably wouldn’t have done multiple levels. I wouldn’t have thought of in in terms of, ‘oh, I haven’t done this before, so it’s too risky’; it would have just been an instinctual avoidance of this. So, once again, I was very glad to have Marie around here — much better to run into this kind of roadblock during a game jam than to run into it during a real project.

Page Flipping

Going back to the book for a moment… you were supposed to start with just a couple pages in your book, and as you went to new places, you pages would be added, giving you clues about where to go next.

Didn’t implement that at all.

There’s not too much to say about that, really; the book system wasn’t, well, a system. It wasn’t the sort of thing where you could add pages at runtime and have the book game object be updated for you. Just a bit of poor planning there.

Wrapping Up

I can’t emphasize this enough: I’m really, really glad I went to the Game Jam with a partner this time. What I learned this time around wasn’t a new algorithm or modeling technique; what I learned was the value of partnership. It’s great to have another person around, using your building blocks in unexpected ways, questioning your assumptions, and taking you to places you wouldn’t ordinarily go.

We’re already talking about doing Ludum Dare together when the next one comes around. 🙂