Part 1 - Planning

The most important skill to have for game jams is a good sense of what you are capable of within such a short time frame.

After 2 game jams with one where my scope was way too far of my current skills, I can approximate what is an achievable goal for a week-long game jam (and fail to acheive my goal anyway)

From the very moment when i decided to go for this game jam (the day before it's starts), I started planning and assembling my resources.

I started by creating a board on trello (any other planning tool such as paper and pen might suffice). In this board i tried to keep as few items as possible to make a game I believe on. And, by the end of the jam, I still had items not done (not a lot but they exists and stare at me with their "what about me ?" look).

The theme of vampire let me go with any character I want => I can use www.mixamo.com .
For sounds, lets make the ones I can and the rest is taken from freesound .
I never tried to do a Third person action/combat game => Let's do it (after all it's a game jam, for fun !)
As I joined the game jam at the last moment, I have no team, and no artist => Let's prove that learning to use SideFX Houdiniwas the right choice (and yes it was !)

So, I had to :

• Make the gameplay
• implement the animations in game
• make the environment props
• change the textures of the mixamo characters I took
• make the level
• create/implement sounds
• make a menu/win/loose screen
• make an intro cinematic

All in 6 days (I couldn't work on it on Sunday).

That let me plan like this (in order of priority):

1. Gameplay prototype : Player interaction/camera
2. Gameplay prototype: AI
3. Environment : 4 buildings (at once thanks to Houdini) , 1 tree, one trash, one street light.
4. Level design
5. Sound implementation
6. UI implementation
7. Menu/Win/Loose screen
8. About/controls UI
9. Introduction sequence

I had to drop two things because of the time I spent trying to implement a free flow like combat (witch I failed):

• A level boss
• One game mechanic : The ability to dash/teleport as a bat near an opponent.