You can sign-up for the survey without a team and then use these forums and the IGDA Discord to find team members. Once you find team-mates, just sign-up again for a mentor through the form.
OK that's great. We have done this.
A member registered Aug 11, 2017 · View creator page →
Creator of
Recent community posts
What We Set Out to Achieve
The main aim on this GameJam for us was to get my son Jack some experience with coding in C++.
I also wanted a refresh on my C++ skills having not used it in anger for a while.
We also wanted to learn the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) developmemt libraries. This is a low level library that we wanted to use having used Unit before and having felt constrained by it a bit.
What Worked Well
Getting Jack Experience in C++
Jack picked up C++ very surprisingly quickly, much quick than I had expected as C++ is a hard language to learn. Jack pretty much worked it out for himself after I gave him a 30 minute talk about C++, memory, pointers, buffer overflows, memory management etc.
Most of all Jack really enjoyed it all.
Using and Learning SDL
This was a win, it's a great library - one of the best things you can say about an API is that it works the way you expect it to.
Very happy with this and we will use it again next time.
Before the Game Jam we spent two days and completed Lazy Foo's SDL tutorials http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/ and this helped a lot.
Also the SDL tutorials on YouTube by Ather Omar were helpful https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhJr2LOK-xwxQlevIZ97ZABLw72Eu9he7
We learnt to "calculate" the level design, economy, timings and reward vs risk up front (in Excel) before adding it to the game (in our previous game we added this to the game and tried to tweak it after the fact - a bad mistake).
Subversion and Tortoise
Again and with previous Game Jams these were the stars and allowed us to work on the same files of code at the same time. Of 152 check-ins, probably 50 required a merge of Jack and my code changes – only occasionally did the auto-merge fail and even then Tortoise’s conflict resolution tool made short work of it.
JIRA
We were obsessive about using JIRA for everything – no “Remember to add X later” conversations or notes. Everything we had to do, change, fix, improve etc had a JIRA ticket raised for it.
It meant we forgot nothing and had solid goals to aim for.
I use this at work but it was so useful on previous GameJams that I forked out for a personal copy.
Excel
We learn this in our first Game Jam that Excel is a great tool for level design. It can plan out the levels, story line, track difficulty and the game economy. We have since learnt that many developers use Excel in the same way.
Nullsoft Installation Scripts
I tried a few other tools to try and make the installation package but came back to NSIS. It can be a little complicated but it just works.
What Didn’t Work
Not much really, all seemed to fall into place.
One issue of our own making was the we based the geometry of the game with 0 degrees facing down and +ve degrees turning anti-clockwise as most things in the game move down the screen. But the SDL bases rotation on 0 degrees facing up and +ve degrees turning clockwise. This difference caused us a few bugs and puzzlements - missiles flying sideways for example. We won't make that mistake again.
Lessons Learned
There's Never Enough Time
As before the 5 days deadline on the Jam was both a blessing and a curse. It put a lot of pressure on us on one hand – on the other it made sure we got things done. We enforced a 8am to 4pm work day and broke that most days - mainly because we were having fun.
By day 2 I thought we would run out of time, but by end of day 3 and on day 4 we were well ahead of schedule we struggled to get the story line all completed and in the game on day 5.
The level design, story-telling, layout part, although not as technical as the core mechanics and game programming is always a slog to get done and to test. Need to remember to leave enough time for this next time.
Tools We Used
SDLv2 - for the game engine.
Visual Studio 2017 - for writing the and unit testing
JIRA - for bug/issue/task tracking and Kanban boards
Subversion - for version control
TortoiseSVN – GUI front end to Subversion
Notepad++ - for additional editing
Microsoft Word - for design documents and producing focus group & play testing questionnaires
Microsoft Excel – for level design.
Websites We Used
Stack Exchange – indispensable for any programmer
FreeSounds.com – for sound assets
Itch.io – of course
Conclusion
Whilst it was tough, pretty exhausting and a lot of work we both really enjoyed it. We will to do another when I can arrange more time off work.
SDL v2 was great to use and I can see a lot more we can do with it, we'd like to use it again.
We are really pleased with the game, it is by far the best game we've built in the 3 game jams we have done.
And Finally, Things I’m Really Proud Of
I’m really proud of Jack, he picked up C++ coding faster than I though anyone could, I put him under a lot of pressure to learn new stuff and develop a game. He had to put a lot of work into the level design on the last day. He did really well.
In the end, everyone in family was involved in producing the game, so thanks to them all.
Development Log for Sector-104 : Final Day 5
The final day and a final push to get the game completed and submitted.
We had four of us working on the game today, whilst Jack was implementing the story board in the game. I was fixing bugs and tweaking the way the game played plus adding a couple of other nice to haves - and also building the installer.
We were taking snap shots, sections of the game have having these tested by Fred our son that's also a fast fingered arcade fiend to test the game parts and giving us feedback - the game is possible (at least sections we tested are) but you won't complete it first go, you'll need to learn how best to defeat certain sections. You also need to converse ammo and fuel to survive - aim carefully, make every shot count.
Mum was testing the game and also proof-reading the story for us and co-ordinating everyone.
The game is pretty much complete, we could maybe have extended the story to make the game a bit longer, there's also one annoying bug we couldn't work out, but fortunately most players may see this unintentional behaviour as intended, I leave the player to work out what that is :)
This was our third game jam and it's by far the best end game of the three, so we're quite proud of it. We certainly met out aims of the project, Jack learnt C++, picking it up far quicker than I expected, I brushed up on my C++ and we both learnt to use the SDL game libraries; these we will definitely be using again for another Game Jam.
I will do a wash up of the project over the weekend; what worked well, what didn't, what we did well, what we did poorly, things we would do again and things we would change.
After 5 days of pair programming:
Development Log for Sector-104 : Day 4
We had a change of plans on day 4 realising that we couldn't really implement the story fully until all the game code was fully complete. So Jack and I spent all day completing the games features and ironing out bugs in the code. Jack has coded up all the enemy code and I did most of the game code. Jack also got music and sound effects in to the game. So the game is now feature complete but still only about a minute long.
So Friday we have to complete the story board, implement that in the game, play-test and tune it. This doesn't sound like much but this may be difficult to do in a day. One thing we know from our previous two game jams we have done is that the game pacing and difficulty level is critical to the playability of the game - we need to get this correct. As Jack is the game design this falls to him to do. I will be creating the game installer and also helping play test the game. Unfortunately we've lost out main play tester, Fred, as he's going for a sleepover at a friends.
As with a previous game jam we will use Excel to plan out the story board and have an Excel macro export C++ code we can plug into the game.
The title screen:
Development Log for Sector-104 : Day 3
Again Jack and I spent most of the day coding, the game is now playable but currently only 30 seconds long.
We've met our goal just about of getting the game pretty much there by the end of today. We also managed to get our story player into the game today ahead of time. With that done Jack can implement the story and level designs tomorrow. There are still a few things to complete in the game and I will be doing those tomorrow. Tom and Seth have also been making some tweaks to the sprites today too.
This leaves Friday for tuning and also to create the game installer.
We're both really liking SDL it just seems to work with no issues.
We've got the music track in the game now too - so we'll be sick to death of that by Friday evening.
Finally feeling like we're actually going to finish this game in time.
Development Log for Sector-104 : Day 2
Jack and I spent most of the day coding, the core of the game is now there, we can move, we can shoot, we can blow up enemies. We're invulnerable at the moment but that will be implemented tomorrow.
Tom and Seth have been doing more sprite work, refining the sprites already done and creating new space station sprites.
Whilst we have a lot done the amount of work still to do is a bit daunting. We pretty much need to get *all* the rest of the game mechanics completed tomorrow so on Thursday we can implement the level design, leaving Friday for tuning.
C++ coding is now coming back to me and I'm about 80% up to speed, Jack has also been picking it up quickly for beginner in the language. SDL has proven very nice and easy to use, it works pretty much as you expect to it, its intuitive which is always a good thing for an API.
The scary Kanban board, it goes off my screen - so much still to do...
Development Log for Sector-104 : Day 1
We started off the day with Jack and I discussing the main points of the game design and making sure we both kept the game simple to develop but had enough in to make it interesting.
After that we produced a couple of rough mock ups of the game display to have an idea what we were doing.
I then started coding the core engine bits, trying to remember all my C++ (find it's not like riding a bike and you do forget bits) and checking the SDL docs and tutorials every 5 seconds. Meanwhile Jack started story-boarding the game and fleshing out the details enough to get a list of images and sprites we needed.
We then got Tom and Seth involved, discussing the game and the style of feel of the game we wanted and provided them with an initial list of art work we needed from them - mostly sprites.
For the rest of the day Jack help supervise the art work and they got all needed sprite work done but this will need some refinement tomorrow after seeing the sprites in the game. We need to remove the outline as it looks weird against the black background of space, also we need to make details on the sprites more “blocky” to make them stand out better.
Jack also worked on a rough plan for the levels of the game, a game story (if we get time for that) and did some maths on the quantities and supply etc for the management of the in-game resources.
I spend the rest of the day completing the core game engine in C++ and SDL and Jack started to get involved with coding this too at the end of the day.
Tomorrow Jack and I will need to tune the game engine and really nail that down and get the core of the game working and Tom and Seth will be refining the sprites.
