Waiting For Uptrend

Made with	Unity
Timeline	1 week + post-release improvements
Playable	Itch.io
Source	stevepdp/waiting-for-uptrend

Retrospective

Made for Weekly Game Jam 204.

The Idea

The jam theme was “downhill”.

I juggled several ideas this week, but crypto’s volatility kept repeating on me. I had observed the events that lead up to the most recent dip. The memes and discussion threads that followed too. So I thought that for this week it would be fun to explore and communicate aspects of it.

What went well

I learned a ton this week and I hope it shows in the presentation and interactivity.

One of the criticisms I received last week was that the game was too short. So this week, I’ve explored a game with several endings.

When the jam wrapped up, I had enough time between to be able to go back and fix up issues in the previous week's project.

What went wrong

I wasted a LOT of time trying to figure out how to render a line graph. If I had asked somebody in Discord, then I could’ve saved myself the better part of a day. In the end, I cut the feature.

I also spent much too long trying to figure out how to make sprites respond to click events. No amount of prior CSS z-index knowledge helped. Several wasted hours later, I realised that I could’ve used Unity’s built-in UI buttons. So I implemented those instead.

What I learned

When you’re stuck on a problem for more than 15 minutes, ask somebody.