Melon Man Game
Overview
Melon Man is a 2D-platformer game featuring multiple levels, high scores, and more. Available free on Steam and MS Store. Built in Unity using C#.
Backstory
A few years back I ("brilliantly") had an idea of making a game, almost like an urge to. Oh boy what a rabbit hole it took me down to.
Some things to note; I had never developed a game before, but I said hey why not. Around 400 hours later, after countless YouTube tutorials and guides, I had a final product, which I wanted to share with the world.
Now years later, I think of it more of a prototype, demo, than a finished game, but it has a special place in my heart being the first game I built.
Features
- Various levels with different mechanics
- Save / Load game progress
- An extensive character controller (sadly quite spaghetti code)
- Highscore system
- Simple, easy to learn mechanics that are hard to master
- Self composed music
- Different difficulties to choose from
- Settings menu with options for separated volumes and resolutions
What I learned along the way
- Basics of game development (or at least the idea)
- Importance of git (I'll come back to this)
- Building and packaging software to Steam via their own tools, which actually wasnt too user friendly for a beginner
- Building software for Microsoft Store via their own tools
- Creating simple scripts in C#
- 2D game assets, their properties and what matters, how to use them
- Planning and implementing a video game from idea to "finished product"
- Q&A testing, auotmated tests for simple scripts and game features
- Unity editor, and various game development-related tools for utilities supporting the process
What could have been better
As I told about git, and the importance of it. Well, my hard drive died about a year later, leaving me without the original project, scripts and scenes in Unity.
I were able to salvage some of these later from the game build, as I wasn't smart (luckily) enough to encrypt the builds back then. But puzzling together everything without the actual project files was too big of a challenge.
Lesson learned; use git, even for small game projects.