DEV Community: MungyMug

Game Jam #2

MungyMug — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 09:05:11 +0000

So.... umm yes, I am back. And yes this time I joined another game Jam.

Here's the link to that before I even start to talk about my experience with this Jam.

[(https://mungymug.itch.io/teragrowth)]

So yes, this time the Jam was different. Its a 2 day Jam, and after my first experience on Jam, I was thinking. How hard could it be.

I was very wrong on that. This was a disaster, but one that is very fruitful and I learnt alot about in the process of making. I knew that for this Jam, I wanted to go for a simpler game, and one that is more art-ish in a way. So I decided to do my own art. And let's jsut say it wasn't easy but it turned out alright.

Art has always been something that I sucked at, but after doing it for like the past week, I realise its about the rules that you should follow to come up with good art. Not gonna dive much into that though. What I am going to talk about though is these 3 things

Unity - Canvas
Unity - Build Profiles
My experience overall

So Unity Canvas... holy hell it was a disaster trying to use it. I expected it to be around the same but using a Canvas and just importing PNGs into the project made Unity lagged up so badly everything time I try to make changes to the code. It's so annoying.

Ui elements were even worse on Unity, me- the newbie thinking that everything will look just fine as long as the play window looks good jsut decided to carry on and build the game. I knew I wanted to make a web based one this time as, web based games tend to do better. That was my first step.

But i did not chekc my build profile and resolution for it, so I jsut did my canvas and UI with my play window at 1920 * 1080 resolution, low and behold, it did not turn out well.

Mistakes I made was not understanding how canvas works in unity.

A thing that is important is the anchor for Ui elements, it ensure that no matetr what size and resolution it is, the thing will be in the correct spot. This is something that I have to look into and understand more.

Another thing that I seriously did not do is...

PREFABS, I mean look at this mess... I literally had to go and changed everything one by one, making sure that yes, it works as intended, but with proper prefabs implementation, this would have been a breeze.

One good thing that I have picked up and will be using more often from now on is a Game Manager, this is crucial in helping me manage all my game states and scene changes, its like a central hub reallys help to keep things more organised. But... of course I did not really made full use of it.

Another thing I would bashed myself for, even though I know it aint right, but because I was so anxious about the Jam, I literally say screw it code. I mean... here's a look

Like what in the world is this... This can be simplified into a simple function, but guess what I just did... yeah copy paste copy paste, at first it was okay, but as the game expanded, I got lost. Never ever will I do it again. This is not coding by all means. Its a disaster.

But really back to Game Managers, it really help streamlined my buildign process making it easy for me to jsut go to one thing, because I know that is where everything is connected to. I mean for a small project its fine, but as it gets bigger, I think things should change.

But look at this image, it really shows you how easy it is to locate these things. Just game manager, cause its there.

Lastly though... are my thoughts. Game Jams, there are great and an extremely good way to really apply what you learn and test yourself at the same time while having fun. Though 2 days ended up causing more stress than fun, I did enjoy myself and learnt many things along the way. Will I do it again if i ahve the chance? Probabably not yet... UNTIL I get a better grasp of the engine. I gotta test and tweak and play around with it by myself. But other than that. Thank you for even bothering to read. That is if there is anyone.

And do check out my game. TeraGrowth.

Game Jam #2

MungyMug — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 09:05:11 +0000

So.... umm yes, I am back. And yes this time I joined another game Jam.

Here's the link to that before I even start to talk about my experience with this Jam.

[(https://mungymug.itch.io/teragrowth)]

So yes, this time the Jam was different. Its a 2 day Jam, and after my first experience on Jam, I was thinking. How hard could it be.

Unity - Canvas
Unity - Build Profiles
My experience overall

But i did not chekc my build profile and resolution for it, so I jsut did my canvas and UI with my play window at 1920 * 1080 resolution, low and behold, it did not turn out well.

Mistakes I made was not understanding how canvas works in unity.

Another thing that I seriously did not do is...

Another thing I would bashed myself for, even though I know it aint right, but because I was so anxious about the Jam, I literally say screw it code. I mean... here's a look

But look at this image, it really shows you how easy it is to locate these things. Just game manager, cause its there.

And do check out my game. TeraGrowth.

Game Jam #1

MungyMug — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 09:20:54 +0000

Okay so recently I started unity and right as I was doing that, I also decided to joined a game jam as well.

To be more specific this jam -> https://itch.io/jam/jame-gam-48

The following blog post will share with you all about my experience working on my first ever game jam. For anyone that wishes to try my game out before anything, here's the link. -> https://mungymug.itch.io/goblin-scoops

Initially I had my doubts, I was barely like 2-3 days into learning how to use the unity engine and here I was joining a Game Jam already. But to be honest, I am glad I did, because this sky rocketed my Unity Learning Journey.

The idea for the Jam was simple, to make a 2D game that just runs. That was my goal, I didn't had high expectations for it and I was really just planning to get something just up and running. But as the theme for the game jam dropped, and I booted up Unity to start a 2D project, I blanked out.

Firstly - Even though I had experience in making games, my mind blanked out as soon as I started it. (Even though I literally just completed a module that requires me to make a 2D game). But hey to be fair, Unity UI's were just to overwhelming and feature pack that in the few days I had to mess with it, I was just completely lost.

Secondly - I lacked a plan. I find this step one of the most crucial and important one that I just overlooked. When the theme dropped, and it was about roads. I just thought about ideas and things that I think would be fun to play with, but I never actually dive deep into brainstorming how to actually go around implementing it. Until... I did.

So why did I settled on a 3D game then, even though I had 0 experience making one. Well... the reason was actually because I just happen to be watching a tutorial on how to make a 3D game, so I decided why not? And that's how I started the Game Jam.

Initially I decided to make a game where it was like crossy road, but the twist is that you have to chase after a mob and catch it. So, it's not really an "Endless" game but a game with an objective.

I know coding so initally it was easy, everything was smooth and I really just created scripts back to back to back. When I stumbled into a problem, I just sat and thought about it however, as the game slowly came to life, I realise that, the idea that i had was so damn boring... and yes a little complciated.

Physics in game was not really my strong suit, because I didn't really messed around with it much, so I literally disabled all gravity. Honestly, I wished I didn't but yeah it turn out alright. Why? Mainly because there was just so much going on in my game that, it did not really matter much.

Oh another problem that i faced and really reflected on was Prefabs. I was glad my laptop did not crash because I really wasn't a prefab guy, until I wanted to expand my game and realise it was impossible without it. So note to self is - always prefab anything and everything I guess. Another thing about prefabs was actually the way i created it. When I first made a prefab, I started out with the object, and then just creating an empty parent to drag the object into it. BUT HUGE MISTAKE.

Here's some image to once again remind myself to take note of this mistake that I made.

As you can see, my parent coordinates were at (0, 0) but my child was at (700, 462)-ish. So when i proceed to drag the child into the parent node...

What happen then? The child will be under the parent, but, its offset that it has will remain. But I did not know that, so what my prefabs that I created was a total nightmare, all with different coordinates. I thought it was a bug so I spend the 1 full day trying to debug it just to realise it was... just my own careless mistake.
(Note to self, either reset the child coordinate, or create a parent one first and then start from there to create a child node.)

Next smart thing that I decided to do was to mess with the UI, to be mroe specific, changing my canvas to Screen Space - Camera.

I thought whatever you see on the screen is how you game will look like, and I was so wrong. When I finished the game and decided to make the .exe and all. On my first play test, I was like ??? Where is my UI, I scour the internet to find what's wrong, just to find out that it was because I messed with the Screen Space. I had less than a day to fix that, instead of reverting, I literally just move and download and test, and over and over till it was right... When it looked right on my screen I was so happy. I sent it over to my friends to test it... just to be hit with another nightmare, the UI was missing on their screens but it is fine on mine... At this point I was desperate to finish it. so I literally place the UI in a spot where I knew it would work for almost all screen resolution and size, which is smack in the middle top and sent it.

(Note to self, just use Screen Space - Overlay, until you decide to deepdive into Screen Space - Camera)

Lastly was, the lack of planning, this caused me huge, and I mean like massive time lost. Because I was just doing things here and there, jumping from one place to another, before realising wait, this is too hard and complicated to implement and ditching it. And then there was the creativity part, where ideas just keep changing because it wasn't feasible, or it was too boring.

But in all honesty, I was glad that I went through all these, because it was exactly times like these, where you try and then you realise and then you learn from it that helps build the skills. I am sure in my future games, I will be throwing away features, changing things because its too hard etc. But coming up with a genral direction or map out a plan and scope of the project will definetly help make the process of making games way faster and with better quality.

To anyone that read it this far, thank you. But yes... I don't expect you to. I am just writing all this here, so that I can keep myself accountable and keep documenting my learning journey.

Unity Learning Blog #1

MungyMug — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 11:45:15 +0000

This shall be my first blog to document my learning journey I guess...

For those that are curious to know... I don't really do this type of thing. But I wanted to try something new. And blog seems to fit that criteria of like little things to do, its simple just typing out and recalling your learning process. Way easier than making videos, though I plan to look into that next time.

The purpose of my blogs are

Active Recall
Keep myself accountable
Identifying my gaps
And maybe building a small audience base (Hopefully)
Most importantly is to get exporsure as well

Honestly, one thing that i have always struggled to do is to be consistent. But when it comes to games though, its just different. So, i hope this will be better.

To give you all some context, I am currently a college student that still studying but I really have a passion for games andhave always wanted to make them. I do have progamming background, which I hope comes in handy for me.

Enough with the yapping. Time to dive into my first blog.

Today on Unity, I started on understanding how the engine works. I know how game loops work so Start() and Update() in mono-scirpt behaviour is not really anything new.

(Start and Update Loop in my mover)

One thing I picked up on is using SerializeField, I realise how useful they were especially when it comes to testing and debugging of games on the go.
[Useful]

Another thing that I touched on is Input, understanding Input is a massive topic by itself, and one that, I am sure is crucial in my Game Dev journey. From what I can recall there is a New and Old Input system. I still don't really get the difference, but I will be keeping tabs on this to come back to take a look. As of now, I will be using Input.(Something).
[Look Into]

Another major thing that I stumbled upon is Cinemachine, based on what I have looked up on it. It's basically an All-In-One camera system.

It has a multitude of features such as Follow, and Hard look at, making tracking of objects very easy. This is a system that i will have to master when it comes to game dev.
[Look Into]

Lastly Time.time and Time.deltaTime, these 2 are very important in their own rights.

Time.time represents the time in seconds since the game started. It advances based on real-world time, not on the frame rate of the game.

Time.deltaTime on the other hand is crucial in making sure that PCs runs the same. Why is this important though?

If someone has a PC that is fast, while another one that is slow, let's say one runs on 60 FPS, the other on 30 FPS, the update logic of the game will only be called 60 and 30 times respectively. This will definitely result in the 60 FPS computer lets say, driving faster because it updates its position more. That's where deltaTime comes in, by mutiplying it with deltaTime which provides the time elapsed since the last frame was completed.

We can ensure that the change applied over a given time or interval is consistent regardless of the number of frames rendered during that time.
[Useful]