I’ve published my first game ever!
What a ride it’s been! I’ve taken a few Unity courses and tutorials here and there, but this is the first time I actually was able to publish something and I feel extremely accomplished, not only for actually putting something out there, but for successfully getting through a really intensive course where you essentially are figuratively pushed out of the tree and you learn to fly for yourself!
What really set this experience apart from others for me was that this course didn’t spoon feed you. It gave you the concepts, sure, but then it showed me how to start problem solving on my own. Case in point, there’s not many tutorials on creating a multi-part destructible boss battle and I’ve always wanted to write a huge r-type style boss battle and I figured, why not try it here? Oh boy was it an adventure! I’ve run into so many challenges and there were a couple that lasted weeks to solve. Thankfully I had coaches I could run to! One was thankfully able to solve an issue by recognizing it immediately with the enemy laser affecting itself and not the player, but there was another case during figuring out the destructible waypoints where I wasn’t told the answer outright, but given a clue where to look and I’m glad they did it that way because there is no bigger sense of accomplishment than figuring something (mostly) out for yourself. Though again, I’m grateful I had help.
As with any first attempt, I feel there’s a lot of things I could have done differently and now with more experience, I could do a lot better and so I plan to continue to practice by attempting more side-quests with other shootemup projects like learning bullet-hell, tiled environments, and better spawning systems but for now, I’m excited to have an actual game that I can proudly call my own. While this is the end of one series, there’s more courses I’m attending and I don’t plan on ever stopping writing these articles now!
Tomorrow I begin the Cinematography course! I can’t wait!
