How you even do something like this in a week? This game jam entry feels like demo for actual game! I can tell from game and feedback you give to other people that you're an experienced guys!
165 days ago(+4)
Thank you! It's a good question. :D
I have industry experience as a professional game artist while the rest of the team are super skilled and passionate hobbyists with years of transferable experience in their own professional fields. Our team was formed through Discord's team finder channel a day before the jam started. I was really fortunate to have a few people message me that they liked my art and wanted to work with me.
We also had lots of free time to put into this project. I was working really long hours and did a fair amount of self-imposed crunch to make the game look and feel as good as possible. Crunch is of course bad when it happens in a professional setting but here it was my own choice.
We picked a game engine that both programmers were familiar with (Godot) and I chose to do pixel art with a limited colour palette since it's a very cost effective medium. You can make lots of assets really fast.
Once we had a game idea we focused on building the core features first. The game was functional on Monday and looked like this.
Any complicated additional features were quickly cut for time. Like the player being able to walk around the battlefield and fight.
We'd hop on voice chat each day to share development updates and to talk about how to improve the game. You want the game to feel good to play early on so you stay motivated to develop it further. Usually it's small things you can add between larger tasks which add up to make a big difference. Enemies don't need to explode on death but it looks cool when they do. The game should have a satisfying response for any action the player does.
With the visuals we had this cool scrolling background shader for our main menu and I realized we could reuse it to create cloud cast shadows and fog effects for our levels. It transformed the game's atmosphere 1 day before the deadline. The intro cinematic went in 30 minutes before the deadline and was made in roughly the same amount of time. The team thought I was joking when I said I'd be making it, lol.
164 days ago(+1)
I did the coding of the main menu as I am pretty new to GODOT. We also had the time to test the game. Thank you very much for playing