So, I’ve definitely had some issues while making this game. Obviously. I’m going to write this for me more than anything, because I know it will help fight the same mistakes in jams to come.

What went right

Well, there were many aspects of the game that went through like a charm. I’d especially like to thank the work of @PolaGB , my sprite artist, who’s done such an amazing job at making this a fantastic looking little game.

• The phone system, as strange as it may sound taking into account it was the thing that threw the project off, is something I consider to have gone quite well. Displaying all the events from a JSON file and putting it into a series of buttons, all of which interconnect so well, is a bit of a technical feat I’m actually quite proud of.

• The art, again. Kudos to @PolaGB for that one, and a little pat on my back for the couple of UI sprites I’ve made.

• Unity plugins. Seriously, they rock. I don’t know why Unity keeps that default text when they’re the makers of TextMesh Pro and can integrate it in ‘vanilla’ Unity without asking any permissions.

• UI work. It’s super intuitive, and all components work extremely well.

• Player movement. Even though it was ultimately not needed, the colliders work brilliantly and are set up extremely easily. This didn’t take almost any time away from the rest of the game’s development.

• Time management. Oh, time management. This week I’ve been ill and had surprise deliverables, which doesn’t help at all during development. What’s more, even in the times I had for game making, part of it was with severe headaches from that illness. So I had to rush everything a lot yesterday night and at 4AM local time I had only the first half of the planned gameplay (we also intended for the groups in the schoolyard and party zone to be interactable with events similar to those from the phone). And even then, I obviously had no time left for debugging, which resulted in a coroutine-related bug which has taken me some time to squash even this morning with a rested mind. But hey, Uni is simple and game dev is easy work, right?

I don’t really think it has gone very wrong overall, though. Sure, rushed at the end and with an end-result for the jam date that was unplayable, but the mechanics I’ve put in and the coroutine-related work has made me learn a lot and forced me to mentally structure a game with a lot of processes running in parallel and how they can interlock, which has been quite educational.
And regarding the jam’s theme, I do feel that playing this game is actually an interesting experience to make difficult experiences approachable, and make people see that microagressions and unfair situations are commonplace in our everyday lives. It is only through a constant effort to help the people in need of support, and a continued rejection of discrimination and hate, that we can aspire to a better world in which people can coexist peacefully. I honestly hope this game is a tiny step in that direction, and that it helps raise awareness for such a fair cause.