First Game Jam

Well that was fun! That was my first thought when I completed my first game jam game which was only supposed to be a practice for another jam that is weeks away. I never really expected to complete this game and I didn't even want to click the "join jam" button unless I by some chance managed to finish the game. But it got to a point where I felt the hardest parts were done and with another day to go (1 free day, last 24hrs of the jam I'd be back to work) I knew that the added pressure of needing to submit something would get me over the line. And it did.

Just to be clear, technically this isn't the first jam I've submitted a game to but the other one was one of those long running, open to projects made anytime kind of jams so I'm not including it as it's not your "classic" kind of game jam.

When I first read about the Jam I'd gone to bed that night thinking of ideas and while probably not the best decision, I went with the first one, I'd use a treasure island free asset pack I'd just recently found to create a platformer which to be honest is one of my least favourite genres. Simply put I just don't like the core mechanics of them generally but not to say I there aren't any I do like, Gunpoint and Mark of the Ninja are fantastic games I enjoyed. The reason for the genre choice being that I thought it would be the quickest and easiest kind of game to make, it definitely seems to have the most tutorials of any at least for the Godot engine. Not having to make any of the assets certainly sped things up and left more time to learning things like how to create a dialog system, something I did not expect to take so much time.

I did not understand why so many tutorials were using third party plugins to handle dialog at a first but it's clear now, even to organise the simplest sequence of events I found the code got messy fast. I ended up with the jankiest spaghetti code but it worked and learned what I want to do to make my life easier the next time. I had a similar experience with the "cutscenes", I hadn't thought it would be very complicated but I certainly have a few ideas now how to make that cleaner and more organised.

Overall I made a very basic, short little game but I improved my skills and best of all boosted my confidence in my capability which will motivate me to continue finishing my game projects.