BirthdayGame started as a gift, something I made for my best friend's birthday that was meant to actually mean something, not just be another thing. At first I juggled between different ideas, I thought the most meaningful thing to do would be to make her something I'm best at, a video game. It was hard to come up with a good idea she would like but once I did I wasted no time developing it.
Not everything I had in mind made it in. Juggling this with school meant some stuff like the player sprite and animations just didn't get finished in time as well as some other ui implementations. But I've decided not to edit the game from sending it over to her. I've kept the game exactly as it was when I handed it over, and I'm okay with that. I've moved on to other things, as much as I would've liked this game to be perfect I know what happens to projects you want to make perfect and end up never finishing. Plus I'm way more passionate about other projects I'm working on.
It was also my deepest dive into 2D development yet. I'm way more comfortable in 3D, so figuring out 2D physics, collision, and how everything talks to each other on a flat plane was genuinely new territory for me. I picked up a lot about game design, level design, how to actually pace a platformer and tune its difficulty without making it feel unfair or boring.
The levels aren't perfect, and I know that. Playing through it with my friend made that pretty clear. She caught things I completely missed after multiple play testing runs. That back-and-forth was honestly one of the most useful parts of the whole experience. It's a reminder of how much you miss when you're too close to your own work.
BirthdayGame is still the most complete thing I've shipped and yeah, it may not be perfect but it's an almost complete package of a game. It genuinely marks the biggest leap I've made in game dev so far, and I'm still carrying what I learned from it into everything I build now. I'm sure that my future projects will see a lot of benefits from the learning journey I got from this and I'm excited to make my first fully complete game.