Hello there! Did this game jam solo, so thought it would be awesome to do a debrief of my game jam submission with you all. Please do join in and ask questions~

Goals for game jam 

1. Learn more about Lighting in Unity.  

2. Learn more about Behavior Trees and Simple Artificial Intelligence (AI).

3. Attempt to solo make a simple 3D Shooter in 48hrs while juggling University homework.

Yea...I was kind of in over my head haha, but challenge accepted!

So here's a breakdown of the 48 hours per Los Angeles Pacific Standard Time (where I'm currently based).

Friday (17 November)

@04:00 omg the game jam started!  Time to search for an XKCD comic.

@05:00 still searching, some of these are really good, can't believe I missed them

@05:15~ Found it! "FPS Mod" -https://xkcd.com/873/ ok time to sleep.

Saturday (18 November)

@10:00 - Woke up and ok its time to do this! Opens up Unity 2017.2...and it crashes. Apparently the latest windows update corrupted the data files again.

@11:00 - Unity finishes downloading again! In the mean time, searched online to find tutorials and ended up watching Brackeys on Youtube. Here's what I watched:

• Ammo & Reloading
• Shooting with Raycasts
• How to make Slow Motion

@12:30 - Made an FPS Prototype using the above tutorials and added some blocks in but there's something missing. 

@14:00 - Played around with the FPS prototype more but started to lose interest. Went to buy food. 

@15:00 - Continued work on the prototype but played around with lighting instead. Found the following tutorials to be really useful:

• Lighting a Simple Scene
• The AAA graphics of Spellsouls: achieving 60FPS on mobile
• Game level texturing: Bake lightmap in Blender and Unity

@17:00 - Lighting is good and the level is blocked out, let's take a break and play with post-processing effects and shaders! Brings in Colorful FX and Unity Post-Processing Effects. Also, the USC vs. UCLA Football game is on - watches it concurrently on ESPN.

@19:00 - Food and Football + Watching Unity lag while trying to bake the lighting with every change (realized later that I forgot to turn off auto-generate lighting)

@21:00 - The football game ends and realized that there wasn't much work done. Decides to start learning / trying out Opsive's Behavior Tree and Third Person Controllers using their documentation.

@22:00 - The food places at the bottom of the apartment are overcrowded because of the Football game. Proceeds to cook up a simple donburi with japanese rice and ground chicken. 

@23:00 - Woah this is alot of documentation but at least the agents are set up.

@01:00 - Okay, so the agents are running around on a nav mesh and I'm in first person. I can't shoot them and they can't shoot me....

@03:00 - Ok let's just scrap my first person mode and follow Opsive's Third Person Controller Tutorial for the player.

@4:00 - It's kinda broken in all places, but if I wake up early tmr, I should be able to get it done.

Sunday (18 November)

@14:00 - OMG it's 2pm! HOW. Gah. I hate alarms.

@15:00 - Ok. Ok. Let's do this...

@16:00 - Wait, I still need to do homework...nah forget it

@17:00  - YAY! Game is happening. Players can now shoot at each other and things happen. Credits to the Opsive Tutorials - it only took like a day to learn, not too bad....

@19:00 - The start of a long slog fixing bugs and polist

@20:00 - Unity crashes again due to windows corrupting files

@21:00 - Took an Anime destress break while waiting for Unity. Managed to catch up to the latest episode on Season 3 Food Wars.

@22:00 - WHY CAN'T I SPAWN ADDITIONAL PLAYERS

@23:00 - Oh, it's all the startup scripts and managers...

@00:00 - Okay nvm, let's just .setactive everything. Okay now add in the Main menu...

@01:00 - Polish Lighting, add more stuff to build

@02:00 - OMG THE PLAYERS DON'T SHOOT EACH OTHER ANYMORE

@02:30 - Okay. Okay. Let's submit the game first and then fix this bug...

@02:50 -  FIXED IT! Forgot to change a tag name

@03:00 - Screenshot taking time!

Debrief

Did I accomplish my goals?

1. Yes! Learnt more about the Unity Lighting systems and materials. Still a novice at making the lighting pop but managed to optimize my lighting to make it look good + run fast. Also pleased that I can make shadows softer now and remove shadow banding.  

2. Well, yes and no. I tried going my own way but ended up following Opsive's tutorials to get their stuff to work. I realized that I should've used a more open-ended asset. Opsive is still too big a package to handle.

3. Really wanted it to be first person but just couldn't hook it up to the Opsive framework in time. Ended up using their default third-person controller with some aesthetic tweaks. The Jump is still weird but at least it works...

Overall - Learnt that the next time, I won't use Opsive's framework because it has such a high learning curve till the point that I rather would like to spend the time building my own. Unity's upgraded post-processing stack is a beast! Also the lighting is getting easier to use compared to Unity 5.