Global Game Jam

Global Game Jam! I have been looking forward to this jam for a month.

So, how did it go?

The game we made was a failure. But you do not learn much from a success, which meant I learnt a lot. This was my first time working in an informal team, and everyone gave their best. In terms of getting a good playable build I could have done a lot more by starting on mechanics earlier. I guess I did not learn from my last jam and got carried away with art. I realise now that the general rule about working feature-wise also applies to teams. We also had a lot of new experiences, it was the first time my team was working with godot and, for a few them, git. Taking that into account our scope was too broad.

We had planned to make a character that can transform into the alien species using a mask (Masks was the theme). We wanted to incorporate narration and a lot of different characters for the environment. Our developer managed to make this happen, unfortunately we ran into problems while integrating the art animations. The rig did not work with the code used for the transformations also I realised there was a problem with the scale used, this shows a problem in communication. Another big problem we ran into was systems.

Some of us were using mac and some were using windows, which meant that the system files and configurations for godot were different. I guess the only solution to this is involving regular merges at the start of the production so we can include the neccesary folders and filetypes for our .gitignore file.

A simplified explanation for my less technical readers is:

Imagine each team member works in a different room with different sizes and placement of doors, and we constantly have to move furniture from one place to another. This means that everytime we move the furniture we have to place the furniture in different locations. Now this doesn't happen with the tool we were using and we have to step in and place everything where it belongs, which can get a bit annoying. We can however tell that tool to ignore certain stuff in the room so it makes the changes needed a bit easier to manage.

While there were a lot of problems with the game and development I still enjoyed my time at the jam and will definitely participate in this jam again. I want to thank IICT and underDOGS studio for facilitating this jam.

Here is a short demo of my contributions: Instagram Reel

By the way this was the first project with some real sound engineering, it really changed the game. Give this guy some love: Tanay.

~sailboat642