Everything I needed to do was held hostage this weekend as I dove into developing a new game for the much harolded Global Game Jam. At least SUNY Albany thinks its a big event and there was enough traffic on the website to slow it down to an absolute crawl.
To begin, this weekend was a lot of fun and I'd like to thank the great people at SUNY Albany and 1st Playable Productions. Lot of great people at both.
This was a great experience. I enjoyed as much as the last. Even though people advise you to not try new things I did. I didn't rewrite my entire pipeline and engine but I did write a few character controllers. I created movement systems that used the physics system of the engine in part instead of whole (the engine is Unity by the way). This was an interesting experience. I learned a lot. The methods used may not be optimal but I have a lot of great ideas I would like to try now to replace those used. Thanks to this experimenting, my team won Technical Excellence for a second year (there were two members in common between this year and last, Frank and myself).
I enjoy making physics based games, while this one does not fully follow a newtonian model except for falling, the movement style was different from other games and one of the core parts of the game. The virtual sensation of this movement method is a ton of fun.
Carrot - The Game
Before I continue blathering about the physics maybe I should go over what the game is. We made a game, and we called it Carrot. The idea that linked it to the theme of the jam, disception, is that the character jumps on an animal and holds a "carrot" on a stick in front of them. The character is limited to moving with up being in the opposite direction of the spherical (or circular, since its 2D). In short they cannot run up walls. The creatures you can jump on can, as well as run upside down. While a creature runs around it can eat other smaller creatures.
I really like this simple gameplay structure. My partners think it needs more, and maybe we will get to adding that later. But this simple package becomes so much more when you add multiple players. There is a simple but very fun aspect to escaping and chasing. Especially with creatures becoming enormous as they eat more. Players get attached to a creature they are growing. Its a lot of fun.
And while its fun, the current implementation is a little frustrating. Creatures move too fast for one and the level design is very poor for the creature and character movement. A lot of variable tweaking needs to happen.
Postmortem thoughts
Game Jams are a great place to test developers and working in an agile environment. It is not a place for testing methods, just new developers. I believe its a great situations to show simple ways of improving team communication in a short time period.
My primary thought on this is builds. Something fundamental to agile development is having an easy to run build system (just hit go) and using it often. (and part of Joel's 12 steps to better code.) Using unity we can create builds in one step but I didn't use it until the end. I wish I had and plan in the future to do so. This would have likely benefitted us. But maybe not.
Another thing we missed out on was having a pure designed in the group. Which there were none of at our jam location. Having a pure designed would have been very beneficial to have someone to test and tweak those fundamental values that never got touched. The core idea of the gameplay was coded (because we had programmers) but the bulk of the design work went incomplete (since we had no designers). As has happened in a lot of projects, I ended up being the task giver. We had artists and programmers and so I assigned tasks as such. But we did have people who had designer stickers (myself included).
So I think I have two improvements to perform:
Build early, build often (and have people test, and give thoughts. this should be a continuous task, almost to the point where people play new builds as they are created.)
I do this already for projects outside of game jams. Finish a task, commit and build. But I didn't do this for the game jam, that pressure for doing everything can make you forget to do some activities.
Don't forget the design (and audio) tasks
They are important too!
I think to solve this I'll make a wallpaper or overlay for my desktop that will say these things in large, menacing letters to remind me for my next jam.
