It feels nice to do ldjam again, I finally managed to get something out even if it wasn't in the Compo or the Jam. I was on the fence about doing it and would only do it if there was a theme that I had a solid idea for.
What didn't go so well?
For the most part things went pretty well, the main reason for the it taking so long to finish was because I went out during that weekend.
Outside of that the main this that slowed me down, was spending too much time fixing issues with the UI and working out getting controls to work.
There were certain things I wanted to do/try with the UI but couldn't get to work.
So, for the UI I wanted to have a bit more of a sequenced application of the uss classes which would result in having something like the following for a UI element:
UI is made visible -> UI width and height are changed -> Text fades in.
I was hoping that using the TransitionEndEvent handling would actually work, but it didn't. While initially it would fade in fine, it wouldn't fade out and caused me to scratch my head as to why, as all I was doing was firing off the initial change, then waiting for the TransitionEndEvent once the UIs transition had finished and making another one (if the sequence had another one).
In the end I determined that something was a bit broken in the UI Toolkit part of things and just put all the changes in a single class that I toggled on and off.
The other thing was getting the new Input System to work with the UI Toolkit, turns out it was a bit more difficult than I remembered it being.
In the end I removed controls for gamepad as I couldn't get that to work with the UI.
What went well?
A lot of things actually, I had a relatively solid idea for the theme and actually quickly sorted the core mechanics of it. Doing a quick design do the mechanics and things like the technical side of things helped solidify the whole idea and speed along the initial development.
I actually had the gameplay itself done in the weekend (which is quite something considering I was out for most of it) and managed to section out the chunks of work in my todo list.
Conclusion
I still struggle with hyper focusing when I encounter issues, but for the most part I'm actually pretty happy with how this tiny project turned out.
If you want to take a look at it you can download it here!
