My role
-Game Designer & Gameplay Programmer
I designed the entire game from start to finish. Starting with a prototype that I build on day 1 within a few hours building further on that I started thinking. How it would play, What the goal would be, How can we make this short game fun with the little experience we had at the time?
Introduction
This was a gamejam hosted during "de warmste week" where the organisors were raising money towards TEJO. I had never worked in a group before and I never joined a gamejam before so these were a first for me. I motivated some classs mates to join me since i thought it was good experience even though we were fresh first years in our second month.
This being my first gamejam, I was shocked. I never expected that I would have learned so much in such a short amount of time.
Progression
Day 1
In the first day the work started off slow, we had a meetup with the team and we distributed the roles, not everyone was present from the start so I took the opportunity to lead the team into brainstorming together and we decided to make an infinite vertical scroller game.
After Discussing the game we quickly discussed Art and ideas for Music. I started working on the first prototype finishing the day with movement/platforms spawning.
Day 2
On this day we also completely overhauled the Idea for the game. Overnight the famous youtuber Mr Beast made a campaign towards saving the tree’s, so we wanted to hop onto the bandwagon to try to get more publicity so we decided to make the main character Mr Beast.
We had a tremendous increase in workspeed,rapidly had a second prototype that shaped up to become the final product. The art, character, sound FX & music was implemented. We brainstormed together and added some powerups to make the game more fun.
Day 3
In the 3th and final day we were filled with stress. We added another powerup, the main screen and we started bug hunting/fixing. When this was done we finalized the game and made it ready to be presented. We sadly forgot something crucial that ended up being embarrasing, a trailer! Everyone’s group had a trailer for their game and we completely forgot about that.
Issues
- Unity unassigned objects
- Mixing up 2D/3D syntax/components
- Stress
- Miscommunication
Glitches
- Wall Exploit (Stick to the wall Spiderman-Style)
- Main Screen Text not showing
- "Instant Death" Scenarios
- Player - Platform collision issues
Things we cut
- Obstacles in the forms of baskets falling down
- Tree Meter
- Death Screen
- Inverse controls powerup
Post Mortem
Our main issue in this gamejam was communication and time management. On the third day we shouldn't have added more features and we should have focused on finishing up the game. We needed better role distribution and we needed another artist since it was a big workload for ours.
We also completely forgot a trailer which was very embarrassing. Our game was too difficult so it wasn't enjoyable for the young audience and towards the end we were enormously stressed. If we had planned it out better at the start, we wouldn't have stressed so hard.