My 4th Game Jam

After less than five months, my friends and I have participated on another Game Jam, where we had to develop a computer game in less than 47 hours. The topic of the Game Jam was “Hero to Zero” and we took that in a very mathematical sense. You can see the resulting game here.

Things that worked well

• writing a todo list inside a markdown, add a letter of the person that is responsible for the task written
  • for S (our arts expert) write a list of pictures that need to be drawn
• really question ourselves if the thing we’re currently doing is important and don’t waste stuff with cosmetic improvements of the game, sometimes they might not even be used
  • instead mark these cool ideas into the todo list and then when all important stuff is done, one can start working on these
  • e.g. we spend a lot of time making the locations on the map show if they have been completed or not by a specific color in a very automatized way but we have never used that, spent some time on custom cursor that we haven’t included as well
• use the Godot picture for testing the skeleton of how the program will work while we don’t have the finished pictures from S
  • add different colors of the Godot figure
  • maybe prepare these dummy props in advance
  • maybe just revise inkscape in advance and then just draw on the godot picture to make stuff

• some way of debugging the program in a faster mode so we don’t have to play the whole thing to figure out that something is wrong at the very end of the game

• also, it would be great to have some pre-made menu, that we can just put into the game, connect the volume settings to it and maybe write some info about the controls
  • the things that need to be customized are:
    • the font and look of the buttons
    • the texts of the controls section (but not necessary)
    • connect the volume settings using GM singleton

• manage SFX locally (maybe it will be less work later), there must be some global sound config though in the GM singleton

• have enough time to let other people play our game and review it
  • even test some tiny parts of the game and let people give us feedback what they think
  • consult decisions with the whole team as more people together are likely to make less hasty decisions

Things to improve

As it usually is, I have been thinking quite a lot about what we could improve till the next Game Jam.