Postmortem

Q: How did the jam go?

A: Not well. The laptop I usually use works great for Unreal, but it stopped working recently, and is currently off for repairs. Until I get it back, I'm stuck with whatever we have in the family. My dad let me borrow his older laptop, with Windows 11 installed. I also have a home computer with Windows 10 installed. Both computers run most of my stuff just fine, but they both struggle with Unreal. The laptop won't run Unreal at all, and the home computer runs Unreal at just a few frames per second, so each and every little task takes forever. Despite my very best efforts, I couldn't even get something playable. I came close, but then something broke in the code and things just stopped happening in the game. The camera also acted weird, so I couldn't even see what the problem was or how to fix it. Overall, I definitely consider this a failure, and a very bad sign for my first ever attempt at a game

Q: How much time did you spend on it?

A: Since my laptop wouldn't run Unreal at all, I had to wait until I got home from school every day to work on it. The most I could do otherwise was graphics, animation, and sound on external programs that did run on the laptop. Since my home computer ran Unreal at a snail's pace, that meant I was up until 4:00 every night just trying to make any sort of progress at all in the game development. I did not make much progress at all each night.

Q: What part of 'making a game' do you need the most help with?

A: Although most of my problems developing this thing were entirely the fault of the hardware I was stuck with, I do also believe that I may have been able to at least solve the break that occurred at the end of the development cycle if I was more literate in the language of code, blueprint or otherwise.