Game Jam Tricks and Tips in Unity

News & General Discussion
1

Hi!

I’ll be doing “Dirty Game Jam Tricks in Unity” talk this year on our local Global Game Jam site and i was wondering what dirty tricks are you devs using during game jams or rapid prototype development to speed up your work?

They can be code, editor tricks or anything you do durign game jams

For example:

  • I’m using a lot of public static in my code and i always have a game manager singletone that contains almost everything related to the general game flow.

  • I’m playing almost always implementing audio by adding main looped track in this singletone and by AudioSource.PlayClipAtPoint(Camera.main.transform.position, clip)

  • I always forget about Object Pooling and don’t care about it.

  • I use as many assets as I can (If game jam rules are allowing using paid assets then I’m doing this as well). Rewired, Cinemachine, TextMesh Pro, and some others are almost always in my projects.

  • If some scripts are not working because of Awake or Start being invoked to late then I’m almost always changing a lot of scripts mono behaviour times.

  • If i need some unique music I’m using a website that generates unique tracks for non-commercial use for free.

  • I’m using 8-bit sound effects generated from a sound effect generator online.

And what are your tricks?

2

My trick is that I don’t use any of these tricks if the jam is longer than one day because I know for a fact that most of them will bite me in the ass if I use them, mostly.

3

Everything in Unity can be accomplished via drag and drop.

2 Likes
4

kiss, just keep it simple in both approach and scope, and dont try to mess with too much extra code and frameworks that your teammates have to learn to hate you for.

Also a growler or 2 of some good beer helps

5

Redbull and beef jerkies.

1 Like
6

That will definitely help with my presentation!

I actually think the opposite. Of course the best is to keep your project simple, but adding external assets like TextMeshPro, Rewired or Photon are just life savers sometimes.

It helps to keep your code simple when you’re relying on external frameworks. And it is a real time saver which is one of the most important factors on Game Jams.

For example, not so long time ago I had to implement my custom InputManager for controlling 8 players on 4 gamepads, because Game Jam rules required me to share my code on Github. I’ve lost few hours on implementing the feature that i’ll configure in several minutes in Rewired.

Can you jam without a beer? I thought it was impossible! :wink: