First Game Jam Submission yay!

Welcome to our first postmortem for our very first game jam submission! We are a team of four, two artists and two developers, of which a few also happen to be musicians. We have Alpha1129 from the artists to talk about their experiences, and myself, twixchexmix, to talk about our grueling time in development.

Artists:

Day 1 - 2:

We started by gathering a whole bunch of references and brainstorming how we wanted the background to look based on the story we have decided upon. We first developed the parallax backgrounds and the characters.

Day  3 - 4:

The characters were finished by this time so kitaquil started to work on the animations for the characters. Both of us are not that experienced in the animation field so we kind of had to learn as we went. While she was working on the animations I took this time to finish up the second and third background we had. 

Day 5 - 7:

The animations for the character proved to be a bit challenging so we kept on working on it. Due to some schedule conflicts amongst the team we also had to take some time off of the game. But throughout these two days we tried to finish up as much of the assets as possible. 

Day 8 - 9: 

For these two days we designed the UI and the title screen for the game and wrapped up whatever needed to be finished. There were some last minute assets needed so we were just online throughout the day to see what the devs needed to be changed or added. We also did a mock up during this to make sure that everything fit together nicely. 

Lessons learned and final thoughts:

There weren't too many issues on the artist's ends. One thing that could’ve been better was our assets, we wanted to create assets that blended into the background so it was one big environment rather than creating multiple assets and placing it in the background. But we couldn’t really do that because we weren’t able to get a level design figured out in time. Another challenge we faced was that since there were two artists working on this game and one did characters and the other worked on the environment and both worked on the assets, we had to constantly check in on each other to make sure that our designs matched up and worked together. Jumping into the game jam we didn’t really think about animations, UI’s, and dialogues. Since both of us are concept artists we don’t normally work on things like that. Those were the fields we struggled with the most and will definitely be something that we will be working on before heading into the next game jam. Overall things went pretty smoothly on our end and I would say that the art aspect of the game was pretty successful. 

-Alpha1129

Developers:

Both of us only had prior experience with Unity, so we defaulted to that for this game. After some discussion to decide the general gist of what kind of game we wanted to make, we settled on creating a 2D platformer with the main mechanic being a “shadow” of sorts that follows the player’s movements with a slight delay.  The idea was to tackle the theme of isolation with what is essentially a co-op game, but played alone instead.

During the first couple days we worked on getting the basic movement and mechanics for each component of the game working, such as the pressure plates that affect certain platforms. For character movement we utilized the wonderfully helpful 2DCharacterController created by Brackeys (https://github.com/Brackeys/2D-Character-Controller). In hindsight, we put the cart before the horse with our thought process, as we didn’t yet consider how these mechanics would work towards creating interesting levels but rather settled on the mechanics based on how it reflects the themes of the story. The biggest example of this is our idea to have disappearing platforms that would disappear if neither of the characters were standing on it, which proved to be very difficult during level design to balance challenge and interactivity. This ended up being scrapped much later once we realized this flaw while designing levels.

The next few days were spent putting in the assets our artists drew up for us such as the backgrounds and character sprites, and finally beginning to design levels. During this time my co-developer terencemui and kitaquil managed to workshop a couple music tracks for the game as well. terencemui also worked on other features we had to add in such as the parallax scrolling backgrounds and scene changes, while I handled all of the level design. Much time was spent trying to think of how to incorporate the mechanics we created into our levels, to no avail. It was only when we were nearing day 8 that I threw in the towel and decided to change the main mechanic of each level, of which only the first level with the light and darkness elements remained from our initial ideas. It was here that we pivoted to precision platforming as the main source of challenge for the player. 

The final two days were filled with hours of designing and testing levels and devoid of sleep. Luckily as I was finishing up the final level we were notified of the three hour extension for submission without which we probably would not have finished our game in time. We added in the final touches like the lines of dialogue (which we had to outsource to a friend since none of us were confident in our writing) and credits. There were definitely things that needed fine tuning, especially the way collision worked which made landing on platforms a little wonky, but we ended with a working game at least.

In retrospect, a lot of things went wrong on the development end, from many hours wasted due to scrapping features and mechanics, to plain difficulties with git and the Unity engine. We definitely underestimated how time consuming and complex level design would be, which is personally my biggest takeaway from this game jam. On the bright side, we learned a lot from this experience, and have a much better understanding of all the different components of game development that are needed to create a polished, working game. 

A huge thank you to everybody that played our game, we hope to see you again at our next game jam to try what we cook up next!

-twixchexmix