Postmortem

Of all of the challenges I faced while making this game, I think the hardest one was trying to push through with making the game despite the burnout. 

Although this was my first experience with unity, my experience with unreal and godot actually made adapting to the game engine a lot easier than I thought! As I have had experience with java before this, the c# was actually quite familiar and nostalgic in a weird messed up sense.

Because of this, I largely had no issues when it came to coding and troubleshooting the scripts themselves as it was well trodden territory. Troubleshooting Unity errors, however, was a whole different beast.

Most of the issues I had came with conflicts between the nodes and silent errors which would not stop the game itself but would also not present itself to me which made it nigh impossible for me to troubleshoot given my naiveness to the inner machinations of the unity gods. To combat this, I ended up playing, saving and checking in the game to unity version control after every small tweak. In order to narrow the scope of things that I had to comb through in order to troubleshoot.

In hindsight, learning YarnSpinner in addition to unity may have been a bad idea. At first, I had a blast of a time since it was surprisingly similar to twine(definitely better too). Sure, I had to spend a whole day reading the docs and figuring out how to download it, but it'll all be worth it, right? Maybe but ohhh man, this bad boy was a nightmare to install. And then came the bugs. Oh god, the bugs. Furthermore, since yarnspinner is a really niche tool, the internet provided no help to me whatsoever. I had to wing it with the yarnspinner discord and a dream.

But I got there in the end. My game was done. It was time to build and upload. Oh god why are half my buttons broken. Unity oh unity my beloathed. So I ventured back into the editor and sought to repair what was broken. This took me way too long because problems with the html would only show up after building and uploading to itch, so I had to individually build and reupload the game every time I came up with a solution. 

After a long and grueling two hours, I finally figured out that the reason my skip buttons were broken was because my canvas was blocking the raycasts to the buttons, so I had to turn their blocking masks off. Satisfied, I built the game once more and…… now my buttons take up half the screen.

Thirty more minutes passed and I realized that the reason that looked like that was because I had not set their anchors properly. So, I finally bit the bullet and watched that 16 minute long unity anchor tutorial to see what all the hype was about. And then my computer blacks out. No issue though. I knew what was wrong, so I quickly fixed the anchors again and sent it to build again.

Finally, after a week of pain and suffering, I click the “run game” button on itch with baited breath. The unity logo loads. My heart is pounding. I click through my character dialogue with baited breath….. and there it is. My beautiful skip button, slightly obscured behind the puzzle but alive and pressable. I whoop. I cheer. I quickly save my unity scene and turn it off. It has been done. As I lug myself over the finish line word by word, I mull over what I have accomplished…

In retrospect, a huge reason why this was so stressful was definitely because I was burnt out by constantly using 5 different software with completely different controls. A lot of the problems were actually quite obvious, but because my brain was all mushy, I wasn't really able to critically think through the problem at all. Hopefully next time round, I'll be in a better mindspace to tackle the problem.