LOG 3
HOWDY PARDNER. The jam submission period is over, and we can’t believe we actually managed to release the game without any huge bugs. Our goal was to make a game that could be played from start to finish and we somehow scraped by.
Words cannot describe the amount of collective bricks we shat while trying to upload the zip file during the last 10 mins before the deadline…
Below are some of our final thoughts on the completed project!
ARTISTS
Lit-ly:
This was an incredible experience to come together with friends and create something both creative as well as challenging as a team. I thank Radchul for the wonderous animation sketch - honest to god her animation has a super saiyan foundation. I will always be second to you like Vegeta is to Goku. These are some of the highlights of our collective efforts.
Spoiler Images:
Radchul:
I can’t believe I made drawings looked like they moved! I did the rough sketches of the animation movement, and Lily wonderfully lined and coloured them. I’m so thankful that she was able to translate my chicken scratch to a decent looking animation. I’m sure there are many mistakes in my animations, but this was super fun and challenging to attempt! Thanks for checking out our game :’)
Here’s some process gifs of trying to convert cloudkourin’s god style to a sprite:
Spoiler - first draft of an animation:
Cloudkourin:
Holy crap look at how wholesome our animators ARE AKJHsjhf ^^^^^
Honestly being able to work with such great friends is probably what motivated me to stay up till 5am drawing backgrounds and endure the late night sUFFer.
I’m still pretty new to drawing backgrounds, so I’m glad I was able to convey a kinda creepy atmosphere despite not being able to draw anything with a colour saturation under 50%. I can not control my hands they thorsty for that COLOUR.
Even though the past few weeks were really stressful, I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the game dev process. This is the second time I’ve worked on a game and I still can’t get used to how cool it is to have the characters I design actually come to life??? LIKE WOAH THEY CAN ACTUALLY WALK AROUND AND INTERACT WITH STUFF. There’s still a lot I have to learn about making maps that are more suitable for gameplay, but I hope you enjoy the game as much as I enjoyed drawing for it, and leave some feedback so we can further improve the game!
Here’s our super lit title screen:
PROGRAMMERS
Exsomni:
OH MY GOD I think this game shaved 20 years off of my life. Random issues just appeared on the last day, Murphy's law prevails.
The game was running fine in the Unity editor but once we built it, a game breaking bug randomly appeared. That was some stressful 5am debugging with no error messages or Debug.Logs to work off of. My Unity program also stopped compiling scripts 3 hours before it was due so I had to spend another 40 mins updating it despite the game not being completely finished. It was not fun. (I really need a new computer.)
A lot of planned content had to be cut out for the sake of time, so while the game can be played to the end, the world we imagined for the game wasn’t fleshed out as much as we wanted. We also couldn’t add a lot of special effects we originally planned to make the game more intuitive. If you noticed some of the hilariously inconsistent item art… they were the ones drawn by my mouse, and did not have enough time to get updated by the artists.
Still, I’m glad we managed to get a working game out with a beginning and an ending. None of us are seasoned game devs (this is my second real go at Unity) so I’m happy overall with the result. I hope you’ll give it a try!
Have an image of our unofficial mascot Mr. Weed Man in celebration of the end of jam:
HikaruRen:
This whole game development progress was a crazy experience. We actually found out about the IGMC a little over a week late so we were actually already behind everyone else in development time. I was worried for a bit there as the initial week into development ended with only base system programming with little progress into the actual game itself.
I think the highlight (Exsomni: not highlight more like lowlight) of this entire game jam was the last hour rush before the submission deadline. We managed to finish out the final bits with around 15 minutes left to spare. I remember we were on google hangouts frantically filling out the project form together and somehow managing to make the submission deadline with 5 minutes left. That was more excitement and adrenaline than I needed in my life. (Exsomni: that was not excitement that was the sound of your life shortening.)
We are by no means professional or experienced game devs. I’ve been using RPG Maker for a good number of years during high school so making a fully fleshed out game in Unity from scratch was truly a difficult process. Some of the things that I took for granted in RPG maker (Dialogue boxes, Scene transitions, basic eventing, etc..) ended up being a lot more complex than I expected to code and implement in Unity.
I think this game dev journey was a really cool experience. With that being said, we still have a ton of things that need to be implemented and fixed that we couldn’t do due to lack of time. EX: The last scene was supposed to be different but we ran into something so we had to scrap it in order to make the deadline. A lot of the gameplay can definitely be improved upon for more visual clarity and better player experience.
Regardless though, we were able to implement some pretty cool content and I’m personally very proud of this game and everyone in our team. Everyone did a super job and I’m very happy with how our game turned out.
I hope you’ll enjoy the game just as much as I did!
WRITER
Smallcritter:
In all honesty, I signed up to just help out a little with editing, and before I knew it I was neck deep in the process, more invested than I’ve ever been with any university project hah a ha (rip grades)
Seriously though, it was an incredibly fun ride from beginning to end, and it was definitely an interesting experience to be working hand-in-hand with the programmers and artists to deliver a coherent gameworld. I do wish we could have implemented a lot more of our planned content, though, but I’m just glad we actually managed to submit in time :’)
My biggest regret is the lack of clarity for interactable objects: all the optional flavour/backstory items were very easily missable, and in general it’s very hard to tell what you need to interact with for progression - given time, it’s definitely what I’d like to see added to the game the most.
Being able to have input on level design and the game itself was really cool, and I even ended up making the little storybook in the first part of the game! Helping make some of the smaller assets really opened my eyes to the suffering that the rest of the team was having to go through, so huge props to them for managing to get through to the end~
All in all, it was a great experience, and I’m really happy to have been a part of it. Thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to follow our progress, and good luck to all the participants!!
Pat wishes everyone a great year.