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Contest Tips

A topic by Magique Productions, Ltd. created May 19, 2023 Views: 152 Replies: 11
Viewing posts 1 to 12
Host

Since the contest started, I've been posting developer tips in the contests channel on Discord. I've decided to post all those tips here and any future tips. I hope contestants can take advantage of these tips to make the best games possible.

Host
If you're looking for content for your Game Jam game, go to the Unity Asset store and set your search parameters to Free Assets. There are 7,665 free assets in 320 pages. If you want to find specific items such as Tools or Templates then you can check those filters as well and see what you can use to jumpstart your games. There are a lot of quality free assets in the store.
Host (1 edit)

Make your game have high replay value. If the game is short with a single goal and when the goal is reached the game is over and there is nothing else to do then that's very low replay value. Make a game where even when the main goal is reached, you can still play the game more and have fun doing it.

Host
Take the time to write a game design document before you start making your game. Even if it's just a couple of pages that outline your features and functionality.
Host
To make assets fit better with your art style, edit textures in Gimp or Photoshop and adjust the Hue/Saturation. You can also apply artistic filters.
Host
Build your game as a fully working prototype before you finalize the details. For example, if you have a village with various locations, you could just slap down empty house prefabs or even cubes to represent the houses. Once the game works and is playable then go back and flesh out the details. The game itself is most important and flashy details should always be secondary and come last.
Host
Find one or more people who will playtest your game as you develop it. Getting feedback on bugs and gameplay is very valuable.
Host
As shown in the Alert demo scene, an AI can have more than one Task Scheduler attached. And there is a Switch Schedule task. So, you could break up more complex AI into different parts of the day such as Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night. Then you switch schedules at specific time of day to have your AI do different things throughout the day.
Host (1 edit)

Using the herd feature you could generate mini monster camps by making the herd spawns be things like fire pit, tent, monsters, treasure. With the right mix of random probability you can have little mini monster camps spring up all over your world with random chance of treasure or unique items. If you make your static objects have nav mesh obstacles then they will be properly navigable after spawning on existing baked navmesh. I haven't tried this yet, but seems possible.

You could also spawn an entire prebuilt camp as well, but getting the elements to fit to the terrain could be challenging unless you have a custom script on them to snap them to the terrain when they spawn.

Host
Just to re-iterate. Art and Sound are no longer judging criteria for the contest. So, you could literally win with a cube world on a flat terrain and no textures if you have the best AI, story, replay value, etc. This is the ultimate contest tip so you focus on what matters and not what doesn't. If you spend all your time on a gorgeous environment and end up not completing the game then you went down the wrong path.
Host

Spawner can be used to spawn resources that a player could gather. These could be quest related.

Host

Now would be the time to evaluate your progress and consider whether or not you need to change the scope of the game to finish it in time. Technically, you should have a fully playable prototype by this date and should only be polishing and playtesting. If you're not at that stage then you should consider reducing the game's scope. If you're not at playable prototype today then try to get there by June 3rd at the latest. That will give you time to playtest, fix bugs, and polish things. 

Also, if you haven't tried to build a stand-alone executable yet, you should do that right away. Some assets have issues when building stand-alone and you may not be able to make one that works without fixes.