The Making of Making The Leap: Pt 2 (Challenges)

Hi! I'm Keenardo, and today I'm writing about my experience making my first PC game, Making The Leap, and the unique challenges that arose from trying to recreate a game that was originally created in Dreams for PlayStation 4.

When I made Making The Leap in Dreams in 2021, I already had some experience with the software, so it came together in about one week. Dreams makes it incredibly easy to get something on its feet quickly. You can have something playable almost immediately, which you can then iterate on from there. I'll use the analogy of making an apple pie. With Dreams, to make an apple pie, you simply make it! Now, it might not be the perfect apple pie that everyone loves, but hey, it's likely your first and you can build on your pie-making skills from there.

I started making Making The Leap in Unity in January of this year as a New Year's Resolution. It was essentially what I used to learn Unity, apart from the Unity tutorial video put out by Mark Brown of GMTK. So having little experience with the software, and intentionally taking my time with what little time I had to work on it, it took me about 9 months. Needless to say, the learning curve of Unity was much steeper for me than Dreams. Here's why I picked the apple pie analogy: If Dreams allows you to just make an apple pie, Unity requires you to paraphrase Carl Sagan and 'first, invent the universe.'

This is perhaps best exemplified by the character the player controls in Making The Leap. In Dreams, this character was created using an asset created by Media Molecule called a Puppet, which you can drop into your Scene and immediately start running around with in Play Mode (Dreams also starts off every Scene with a large platform by default to run around on). The Puppet also contains a series of sliders that control every element of its preloaded animations, allowing the user to finetune their character's movement. The Puppet also contains it's own sound effects by default for running, jumping, landing, even sliding (along with respective animation), as well as a health and respawn system, among other things.

So when it came time to recreate my character in Unity, I had to learn not only how to move AT ALL, but how to implement inputs to cause a specific game element to move. I had to learn how to implement a jump, that didn't also allow the player to continuously jump in midair. And then once I got the movement feeling the way I wanted, I had to construct every animation and implement all the necessary transitions from one animation state to another. Sound effects needed recorded, tweaked, converted, imported, and coded to trigger at the correct times. The musical tones that play in sequence as the player character jumps were specifically challenging, as in Dreams these tones were simply hooked up to a Selector gadget, a prebuilt logic tool that can be used to create a sequence based on repeated inputs. The player jumps, the next sound in the sequence plays. To get this working in Unity, I essentially settled on teaching it how to count to 4 AND reset the count at 4, and then assigning every number in the sequence a musical tone.

I could go on. Essentially every element I took for granted in Dreams required doing things a much more intensive and challenging way in Unity. It really did feel like creating a universe by comparison.

So which do I prefer? Well these days it's hard to recommend Unity, but I don't regret anything I learned building this game in it. Dreams was the ideal place for me to see if I could make a game at all. Unity was always going to be my first choice when it came to building a game on PC. It's what all the devs I've admired over the years have used, and I want to be like them, and have a deeper understanding and appreciation of the work they do. As they move on to other engines, I'm likely to do the same, because I'm also just eager to learn.

Ultimately, despite the challenges I faced throughout remaking this game, they're still the same kinds of challenges I faced making games in Dreams. Because even though Dreams makes it incredibly easy to get started, if you're specific enough in your vision you will always come up against a logic puzzle or programming quirk that you just can't untangle right away. Regardless of what tools you're using, you'll always get stuck, you'll always need to try out solutions, you'll always struggle on some level. But when it works just the way you envisioned, it is the BEST, and it's all you'll really remember. To me, that's game design, regardless of where it happens.

Thanks for reading!