#maya2016

In the Beginning

So when we arrived at Global Game Jam in Melbourne we were all very exited to get jamming, I was exited to have @simon-long as one of my team members. We were keen to start but there was a small matter that had to be taken care of first, THE THEME... This years theme was.

WAVES

This made my mind race with so many ideas; surfing, gravity, sound waves, mechanical waves even microwaves. However I later found that this was going to be harder than I anticipated.

Struggles

After about 6 hours of having no game ideas my team came up with one that we all agreed on. All of our previous ideas were either too complicated or the scope was too large. At this point it was 1AM on the first night and half of us were asleep.

Greybox

We had a greybox by the end of the second day, we also had a prototype that seemed to be working and some models started appearing, everything was going smooth.

Rushing

Day 3 was a day that started off ok, however as the hand in time came closer we found more and more things that had to be fixed. There where breakage in the main mechanics of the game, this made the team anxious and worried we would not be able to finish in time. We finally got things fixed and continued on with trying to implement audio and sound effects.

Hand In

At 4pm we uploaded our game, none of us had really played the game (I know right we were making this game and we barely played it) and it still had some issues, but we made it. 

What Would I Do Differently?

100% we needed to get a build and get some testing done, we needed to get something out there so we had external feedback. We ourselves should have played the game more, I only played the game on the last day when there was no more time left. I would also bring the scope down a little more, although there was only 1 level we still ran into a lot of bugs and road works that slowed us down.

Final Thoughts

All in All I was really proud of my team, we produced A GAME!! in just over 40 hours, that’s crazy, it may be broken and have many issues, but when I got home and recovered from the 3 days, I sat down at my computer downloaded the game and played it... and I had a big grin on my face the whole time.

Here is a link to the game, you will need to play with an X-box controller. (the idea of the game is that 2 players control the same character, one player moves it left and the other right).