My First Game Dev Journey: Week 14

This week hasn’t been an easy one, but I did say I would document both the highs and the lows, and this has definitely been one of the lows. 

I started to suspect something was off when I imported my practice character into the game. They appeared incredibly small, and I had to scale them up significantly just to make them usable. From there, more issues started to appear, the gameplay felt off and quite janky, and there were areas of the map my character couldn’t access. 

Looking back, these were all red flags. I kept telling myself, “I’ll look into that later,” which turned out to be a mistake that has now come back to bite me. 

The moment it really clicked was when I began implementing sound. I noticed that when setting the radius of an emitter, I had to make it extremely large just to cover a small area. That’s when I realised the core issue, all of my game assets were completely off scale. 

I hadn’t fully understood how important correct scaling is within a game environment, especially when it comes to physics, movement, and audio implementation. It makes complete sense now, but at the time it just wasn’t something I had considered. 

So, if you’re following along and thinking of creating your own game, learn from my mistake: check your scaling early on. It will save you a lot of time and frustration later. 

Most of this week has been spent trying to troubleshoot and fix these issues so that I can implement sound more seamlessly without unnecessary complications. It’s been a challenge, but all part of the learning process. 

To keep things moving forward, I’ve also continued working on my game’s introduction dialogue. I’m actually really pleased with how it’s coming together, I’ve managed to get the music to shift alongside the changing scenes, and my next step is refining and integrating the dialogue. 

Things feel a little chaotic at the moment, but progress is still being made, slowly but surely. I’ll share how things turn out in next week’s blog, wish me luck, I might need it!