This is a submission to the Brackeys Game Jam 2023.1, where the theme was “An end is a new beginning”.
My idea was to make a base building game where the player has to survive some sort of disaster. When the player loses, the base will turn into ruins for the next gameplay, so it adheres to the theme.
Ideally the ruin can be uploaded to the cloud and other players can start their new base on it, thus the name “Ruins on Cloud” was decided. However, as the word “Ideally” suggest, things don’t go the way you want, and apparently I was underestimated the workload and overestimated the free time I have (and my will power to not procrastinate). In the end, the game was very unpolished when the deadline hits. It was missing a lot of essentials, such as a main menu, pause menu, music, SFX, hit feedback, tutorial, proper (non-draft) artwork, etc.
Anyway, let’s talk about the development of the game. The most time-consuming part was the grid system, which sounds easy on paper, but it was much more complicated than I expected when you consider vertical building, different building size, ability to remove building, adding initial building, mouse selection logic and other factors.
I was also a bit too naïve to decide to do a base building game. Compare to a normal RPG game where you focus on the main character, a base building game would require you to have building menu, UI to show building stats and cost, building placeholder, logic to add/remove/upgrade/repair building, resource management system, etc. Not having a base building foundation/codebase really made me to spend a lot of time implementing it.
In terms of ranking and rating, my game was definitely a failure. But as a game jam submission, it’s all about what I learned and gained from it. In this dev journey:
- I used Scriptable Object for the first time
- My code was much more arranged and clean (good use of abstract/virtual class) than before
- I realized that I don’t have as much free time as before (or maybe I just got lazy 🙂 )
- I now have a base building foundation, which will save lots of time when I decided to make another base building game in the future
So yeah, in conclusion, I made a bad game, but still worth my time (because I enjoyed it).
