I taught myself Unity and shipped my first game — here's what I learned

Hey everyone! I'm a self-taught solo dev, and Mind Rush: Brain Blitz is my very first published game. No prior game dev experience going in — just a lot of trial, error, and stubbornness. A few things I learned along the way: 🎮 Adaptive difficulty is trickier than it sounds. Getting the difficulty curve to feel fair but still challenging across 8 rounds took a lot of playtesting and tweaking round timers (15s → 20s → 25s across tiers). 🐛 The smallest bugs eat the most time. At one point my timer bar was rendering blurry on real devices. Turned out Unity's default UI sprite has soft edges — swapping to a Square sprite fixed it instantly. Small fix, but it took forever to track down. 📐 Unity's Layout Groups are powerful but sneaky. I had a Vertical Layout Group silently overriding manually-set dimensions on one of my UI elements. Fixed it by adding a Layout Element with "Ignore Layout" checked — but I learned the hard way that overusing "Ignore Layout" elsewhere broke scaling across different device sizes. 📱 Testing on a real device matters more than the editor. Things that look fine in the Unity Editor can look completely different (or broken) on an actual phone screen. The game is live now — free, no ads, works fully offline. If you want to check it out: https://goludakolu.itch.io/mind-rush-brain-blitz Would love to hear from other solo/self-taught devs — what was your biggest "aha" moment while learning?