So I finally finished a game on my own. It is a very simple concept of hang man modified to be more kid friendly. The game is called Word Game for now. The game starts off showing you a plane game with a couple UI buttons. And unfolds through a UI driven interface to play the game.

I really learned a lot on this project. Mostly on staying focused and having a plan. Before I even started i setup a very simple "Design document". Something I have only played around with in the past. I followed this document the best I could. The idea of having a plan really helped me to stay focused on the goal of completing a game. It also helped me know where or what I needed to go to next. It is a step I doubt I will skip again.

I gave myself 2 weeks to make this game. The first time I have EVER done that. I didn't meet my goal of 2 weeks. It did take me almost 2 months because of normal life issues and some slacking off. Thanks to not hitting my timeline though I learned a lot of lessons on time management. Also a few lessons on not getting discouraged.

I know this game is extremely simple but I had a lot of fun doing it and watching my kids laugh while playing it has been awesome!

I struggled with a few things.

• UI - I had never really done UI before so I struggled with getting it working right at first. Also I still don't quite have the scaling down for multiple resolutions.
  
• File I/O - Having a high score screen was a must for me. The topic of File I/O has always been sketchy for me(maybe because I don't do it enough). So it took some google but I got it to work but I feel I don't have a deep enough knowledge of the topic and I don't like that.
  
• WWW/PHP requests - Even though I didn't learn any theory on how it works, especially the WWW stuff in C#. I was able to get it working to save/load the high score for the web player version of the game
  
• Texture tiling - I have never really done much with graphics that was not super trivial and the concept is odd to me. So it took me quite awhile to figure out how to tile one image across 4 blocks without having to create separate texture files for each block. I didn't want to have 4x textures saved for every word in the game.
  

This project has re inspired me to brush up on my math and get to the level I need to be in order to understand the more in depth concepts that I am interested in. I am hoping that my next project won't be as trivial and that I can work towards a simple 2D RPG.

I have the code on github and would love if anyone with time on there hands would like to give me some pointers on the code. I don't have many programmer friends and so I don't get code reviewed often. I feel like it is a huge learning tool though to be able to get the input of someone with more knowledge then you. Here is the link to Word Game Github

You can try the game out on the WebGL version I have setup: Word Game WebPlayer
-WebGL is in a preview phase on Unity and has a lot of quirks. It may take a long time to load. It also will not work on IE.

You can also download the game from my webpage: Word Game Download

I hope to have another game up soon. I plan to to post development journal entries now that I am more comfortable with what I can do.

Any and all feedback is encouraged!