I took part in a game jam!

Hello and welcome… It’s been a while.

As title says, I tok part in the game jam. This one to be exact.

Motivation

Why would you make a game for a game jam you ask? I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to start a bunch of projects and rarely finishing any. If I set any deadlines myself I just ended up moving them indefinitely. Game jams have pretty strict deadlines that I cannot change, so it appeared a good idea to join and try my best to finish the game. This would force me to work fast and learn to see when things start to go out of scope and cut them early.

Idea

Game jam’s theme was “solarpunk”. I will provide a definition for you, because I sure as hell didn’t know what that was.

Solarpunk is an art movement that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges

After giving it a read on wikipedia I looked over something called “wildcards”. Those are optional things that you can choose to include in your game. I decided to take on the challenge from two out of three. One was “Spoopy - make a cute, comical or silly horror game” and “Who even reads? - don’t include any text in your game”. I can tell you that picking the second one was a huge mistake looking back. After a couple of hours of thinking, I had it - a game where you play as death, trying to make it to the people who are about to die. The solarpunk twist is - people don’t die anymore, because one of the contemporary issues solved by humanity was death. It was easy enough to go along this idea.

Designing a game

It was not easy at all, especially when I had barely any experience in godot, or any other game engine. Only thing I did that you could call “games” were stupid rpg maker projects with stock art. This is different. I knew from the start that sprite assets are gonna be the worst part of the whole process, I have no artistic talent, so I had to make the game work without it. My solution was simplistic artstyle without shading or complicated shapes. Black and white levels work well, some minor details are colored to make them stand out.

When I finished the basics, I had a player and a small test level. While playtesting I noticed that it’s pretty much too easy to make it through the level. Instead of trying to come up with some crazy mechanics to make player’s life hell, I decided to go for the simple solution of implementing a timer. Now you had set amount of time to complete a level. Then, the idea came. A simple one, and one that I was able to implement swiftly. Start the player out with way less time, but set up some hourglasses in a level that will add some time to complete the level. This added necesary tension and skill element, since you could skip going for some hourglasses if you were good enough. Now the game had pretty much all mechanics it needed.

The part that took the longest, and made me cut making more levels were little cinematics at the end of each level. Now, in hindsight I can see I should have cut at least one of them and add some levels without animation. That’s a lesson learned for the next time.

I’d like to thank Encode42 for making a great music track for the game, I couldn’t even begin to play around with creating music in the time I had left after I finished most of the game.

What I learned

Definitely measuring scope and seeing if a feature will have major impact on gameplay. I had to give up some features I thought were cool because of time constrains, but I feel like it was a god experience overall, at the start I barely had any idea how to use godot. Now, I believe I have some more knowledge I can use in the next projects.

You can play the game by getting it on itch.io.