Posted February 04, 2021 by createev.games
Hi all! Following advice from Noa's video "29 game jam tips" i would like to share my experience of participating in the first ever jam of mine - Blackhtornprod #3.
Executive) summary / TL;DR
I released a game! It is the first ever finished game of mine, thanks to Noa and all of you!
What went well:
What went not so well:
Below I will describe Final result, process and finish with Lessons learnt in the end.
Final result
I would start from the end - i released a game! yes, it is tiny, little, with clunky graphics and googled art, but it is a completed game with unique experience and addictive game loop.
The game is about one Greedy Honeypot who loves honey and Rock'n'Roll. But is scared to death by bees...) You collect honey and dodge from ever growing army of bees. Nice.)
I am sincerely interested in your feedback and ratings: https://itch.io/jam/blackthornprod-game-jam-3/rate/897546
Process
Find FUN game loop:
I guess it was a wise decision to spend both Saturday and Sunday on trying to find a fun game loop. From commit history you can say I quickly went from:
Then I experimented with different types of enemies:
From then i still spent rest of Sunday and Monday morning on different experiments:
Below is commit history of that stage (newer commits at the top)
Playtesting
At this point I invited my kids (and wife) to do some play testing. Watching how it was going gave my a confidence we are on something addictive and fun. And also provided some (constructive) input)
Theme for game loop
You can see that as soon as i was back to "FUN with kamikazes" I started to think of theme and what real life behaviour this prototype could represent... and voila - next commit was already "Bee and animations". Unfortunately I can not recall now how Bee-theme came to be but thinking process was: here is prototype, what real life situation could represent it.
Since then actual production started - i was adding sprites and animations, tweaking images and also created UI.
Music and audio
My another hobby is music. In fact coincidentally my band released a new Single right on Friday, Jan 29, the day of game submission)) Not to plug myself but rather to share my creative work in full transparency this page contains links to Apple Music, Spotify etc. for this single: https://band.link/Lypmd
So I had a little rock'n'roll theme in my head during that week and i decided to use it for the game music. And so I went on and recorded the theme using my Fender Stratocaster guitar and Logic Pro X. It was Wednesday, 27th.
Then sounds were recorded, including ZZZ sounds of bees, Nyam sounds (when pot "eats" honey) with my son - it was of course absolute fun to mess with different sound ideas with my 6yo old).
Bug fixes, art and submission
There are zero commits on Thursday - indeed i was totally busy and did nothing besides reading itch.io and unity manuals on how to create builds and submit to itch.io.
And then real pain started...
So i found i lack any GIMP skills whatsoever => and they are required even if all your graphics is vector based and/or imported.
I spent whole Friday building, fixing bugs and rebuilding a game. I guess game was submitted at least 7-8 times before i decided it is clean enough to be published. Every time some little bug was found (by me).
Lessons learned
New game development skills I tried for the first time in this Game jam:
There is a tremendous benefit from this game jam for me trying (and applying!!) new skills. To name a few below are areas i never touched before in gamedev:
Process
Skills
And, finally, as First Tree maker said: Finish the f...g game!))
Thank you all and i hope you find my thoughts valuable and useful for your gamedev journey.
Of course i will appreciate if you check my tiny little game and provide feedback and rate it too: https://createev.itch.io/greedy-honeypot-in-rock
All the best,
Andrey "Createev"