Ham Toss: Summary

What I knew coming in:

• Making sprites + changing sprites to simulate animations
• Using Animation and Animator windows
• Handle UI elements in a separate script
• Spritesheets and perfect alignment
• UI EFX toolbox and the MyBox repo continues to be invaluable

What didn't pan out:

• Cut rolling wheel hamster, not that I didn't want to do it. I just forgot to. And by the time I was going to do it, I didn't have much interest.
• Different scenes like Toss the Turtle had- didn't see much of a point/find the fun of it, plus it was a lot of work. However my current worldgen script would have supported it.
• Bounces and trying to calculate how those work. It ended up calculating every frame in the OnTriggerEnter2D function, plus there were two colliders and they doubled their calls, so 'bounces' would actually end up being about 400 more than necessary, making me divide by 40 at the end of the runs to show a 'realistic' number.
• Effort calculation. This being random each run meant sometimes a run with the same upgrades would only last about a couple seconds versus minutes at a time. There wasn't a great way to figure out how much work it would take the player to be able to buy everything.  I'll most likely have to tweak this through player feedback.
• Stats -> Settings. Not necessarily a failure or misstep in any part, just forgot I had to include a volume slider and mute button, and I ended up rebranding the Statistics page to include that information.
• I couldn't get a proper WebGL build for this project like I could the others, WebGL seems to be a dick sometimes and cause issues that are completely invisible to development build or any deep profiling, so it had to be strictly standalone
• Parallax background, thought I could do it with having different Z depths, but clearly it's a far more complex effect than I thought.

What I know coming out:

• Simulating 2D objects in a 2D space
• Good 2D background elements are honestly invisible. I forgot they were there several times.
• Making my own prototyping assets, while uglier, preserves my vision and style better than soul-less assets (not that assets are bad, they just didn't help as much as having my own art!
• Physics materials
• Effect of the 'hamcoins' duplicating and going into the coin UI. The code is re-usable for sure, and I love the effect of it.
• New script for IO for any platform without having to think about it
• How to scroll back on 2D to keep objects close to Unity origin. A single run can last hours potentially and memory won't run off.
• Basic worldgen (quick and dirty)
• Polish early, I think doing sounds at the very end limited the potential for this project, but it kept me in scope.

Unused Hamster wheel

Prototype Hamster sprites