I finished my first game ever! Before that all I had built was Unity prototypes.

https://jorjordandan.itch.io/bubbletoy

What went right

SOUND - I was really happy to be able to build a full game, with a soundtrack, lots of sound effects (which are all just me recording into a mic and then pitch shifting it), with all the menus like a pause screen, win conditions, six levels, even an end game screen! Music took four attempts, but my final attempt - via sequencing at beepbox, left me with a pretty cool little 8-bit soundtrack.

I'm fairly proud of how bubbletoy sounds. I also think it's fun, but since it's intentionally unintuitive, I don't know if anyone will spend the time learning the slight differences in the way the different glorps handle.

I feel like I did the exact opposite of most people on Ludum Jam - I spent an hour coding the mechanics, no time at all on graphics (except UI) and then basically just tried to polish the heck out of it. I also like the concept.

What went wrong

I think the game is not really visually interesting enough or engaging enough. The little character things I made (I called them glorps for some reason) were just a combination of unity primitives, and I think that will be a big turn off. Also, I think "unintuitive control" is somewhat of a cop out for a game. It's an attempt to do an end run around the expectations for a video game. Maybe everyone should build one once, and then never again. I'm not sure if the game just seemed fun to me because I built it, or if it's actually fun. I had fun playing it with my wife.

End of the day

At the end of the day, I was really happy to just build something and put it out there. I don't know if anyone has played it, or if anyone will, but I'm really happy to have built something complete, and fired it off into the unknown.