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Post-mortem and Thanks

A topic by Farrell Nah Jun Hao created Aug 02, 2016 Views: 311 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 5
Submitted

Hi! Just thought that I should spend some time reflecting on this jam and share a little of what I got out of it for anyone interested.

I'm pretty new to game dev and game jams in general. I feel that this was the best game that I've made in a game jam so far (or at least the one that I'm proudest of). It was mostly complete (except for audio) and the gameplay worked out well. My previous games were either incomplete, horribly buggy, or just not all that interesting.

I believe that the thing that helped most was the planning. I spent more time planning out this game (almost half a day) than I had for any other jam, and it really paid off. All that planning really helped me to solidify my game idea and the systems that I would use to implement the mechanics. I was also able to preempt problems on the development side and come up with ideas to solve them. As a result, the development went pretty smoothly, since I already had a good idea of how the game's systems will be implemented and they would interact with each other. I think the development time I saved was much more than the time I spent planning out the project.

As a programmer, art has never been my strong suit, but I've been trying to pick up pixel art. Its been really tough, but when I look back at my first projects (just cubes and squares moving around), I feel that learning that little bit of art really helped to improve my games, not just from a graphics standpoint, but for the design in general. I'm not exactly sure how to explain this, but designing game mechanics and getting the "feel" of the game right is much easier when there's a visual theme surrounding the game. Not to mention that play testing games that at least have some art in it is much more pleasant than play testing games without any art at all. Overall, learning a bit of art was definitely worth the time and I hope that more programmers would try out some art as well.

Clearly the game is still pretty much trash, but its been a really good learning experience and I had a lot of fun working on it. Thanks to Divitos for hosting this jam. I don't know if you have any plans to do this again in the future, but I hope that last minute jams (i.e. jams at the end of a month/year to encourage people to create games, no matter how small) will become a thing in the future.

Cheers!

HostSubmitted

Hey there boundtotheearth!

I'm glad you enjoyed the jam! I always enjoy reading about the game development process so I was kind of hoping someone would do a post like this. I definitely agree that planning your game before you jump into it can make a huge difference both in terms of the final product and the dev process itself. You were spot on with the art making it easier to get the feel of a game right too.

I don't agree with the last part though where you say the game is trash, i think it's a fun game with a solid idea, the rough parts are pretty much to be expected from a game jam. I was also thinking about hosting another Last Minute Jam between October 28th - October 30th, but I'm not sure. If I don't host one then, I definitely will at some point in the future.

Submitted (1 edit)

In fact, personally for me "Slaves of Giza" is the best game I rated on this jam. Just because I find it the most playable. Sure, it's quite far from really completed game and my words shouldn't make you to relax (:

Besides, I would like to point on significance of team work: this is great idea to have people of different specialities who does their job nice. My game would look absolutely different if not my friend who helped me much with 3D graphics. Thanks, Sangeron! (: My initial design looks so:

The difference is obvious (:

Also I've learned that I need to study some new game engine, because capabilities of Game Maker 8.0 are too little for my current needs in gamedev. I like GM in general, but it's too old for me: GML isn't so convenient as, e.g., C#, it doesn't support Unicode (I'm speaking exactly about GM 8.0), very poor audio capabilities and it's not about 3D at all. 96.5% I will choose Unity3D (mostly because my current lap won't run anything heavier); moreover I've already played with it and had nice impressions.

I'm going to re-implement "The Ancient" with Unity3D if it has good enough rating after the ongoing voting. And I'm already thinking about some quick way to add multiplayer feature to current version of the game (:

BTW, this is my 2nd time I take part in gamedev jams. 1st time I took part in GGJ (unfortunately, offsite). There is the game I've made in 11 hours for the jam:

http://globalgamejam.org/2016/games/omen-0

And, if anyone is interested, there are my past game projects I did implement at different times:

http://gen-inexu.rhcloud.com/data/proj/gamedev/gam...

Submitted

If anybody is interested, there is my new game I've just finished:

http://gen-inexu.rhcloud.com/data/proj/gamedev/bin...

I've made it just for fun, so don't expect much from it (:

Submitted (3 edits)

I know I'm necroposter, but still... (:

I just would like to say that I'm working on new version of "The Ancient" (the game I've uploaded during this jam more than 1.5 years ago):
https://itch.io/t/34313/game-update-multiplayer-ai-menu#post-412653