The Process Of Creating My First Game & What I've Learned

Game development is hard. I always knew that it was. But after trying it myself, I know just how HARD it is.

At first, everything went fine. Made the player move left and right. Jump. But, then he'd jump multiple times while in air, so I fixed that. Then I created the player sprite, the dead sprite, and the ground sprite. That was all in the first day. I also created the main mechanic of the game, the dead body build up, and fixed the player getting stuck on stuff.

ALL of this was on the FIRST day. Everything was awesome. I thought that making this game would be really easy, hardly even a challenge.

The next day I made some edits, and nothing more, since my exams were coming up.

On the third day I added:

-The health system.

-Sound effects.

-Poison mechanic.

-Updated the player movement.

-Added the obstacles.

-Fixed some things.

That was when I got confident. "This challenge is over, before it even started." I thought to myself.

On the fourth day I fixed some stuff, added story and tips, font, and some graphics.

But then... disaster struck.

On the fifth day, I tried to add something... different. Without spoiling the game, it was mainly something related to animation, sound and effects.

Oh boy. I spent almost 11 HOURS ADDING THIS STUFF. I didn't even finish them by then! Of course, the main issue was me not knowing Unity or C# very well, but then again, the stuff I wanted to do was simple, flashing effect, sound effects, stuff to move and stop after something happened, etc.

I put that aside, then finished 2 more levels.

Then on the 6th day, today, I spent another 6 hours working on the game. Hoping to fix that thing that I was working on. I did. But, the code and the project are held by duct tape, that the code is disgusting to look at, and the slightest change to anything might break everything.

I added some menus and more graphics and stuff, then I exported the game 4 times, because every time I do, a new bug appears! Yay! I even uploaded it on here twice due to the bugs!

Overall, I think that in the future I might make even smaller projects, or just stop with game development, because if this is how it is, it might just not be for me, unfortunately. And I gained much more respect to game devs and indie game devs than I already have, which was a lot.