Yo guys the other week I entered my first 48-hour Game Jam okay Okay, It wasn't my first first my actual first was at the end of 2016 from Londonderry 37 game jam in which I submitted super a stack challenge (download link is in the description) But I've always been curious to know what it would be like to create a game within a team of strangers so today I want to talk about that experience with you and for those of you who are unfamiliar a 48-hour game jam is a competition in which you by yourself or on a team have 48 hours to make a fully playable Game then at the end of that 48 hours you release that game and depending on the competition hosts You can actually win some prizes, but for this game jam called the global Game Jam.
There are no prizes You just do it for fun, so let's get into this adventure So global Game Jam is put on by unity3d yes the game engine unity3d They set up hundreds if not Thousands of official jam locations all around the world and the idea is that in order to be eligible You have to participate from one of those locations Which means there's an entry fee or at least I had to pay one walking into it I had no idea what I would find but to be honest I was kind of expecting maybe 15 to 20 people but a ho no no no no to my surprise I think there was over a hundred or something people that showed up I didn't even think that many people in my city where even down with the game development.
Anyhoo part of the entry cost covers two meals a day when I first got there There were serving Pizza, and this was the first game jam activity But after dinner we all gathered into a theater room and watched some pretty strange pre global game jam videos We will remember the splendor of the Sun as well as a perception of Unlimited space in which for a moment we felt ourselves to be free Or at least I didn't understand them, maybe because it was my first global game jam so the references went right over my head But I digress eventually they revealed the theme and it was Transmission.
they then dismissed us to brainstorm some game ideas to pitch in order to build a team now see the thing about game jams Is that they give you a theme at the very start of the timer to help make sure that you're making a game within the? Competition time if your game doesn't somehow incorporate the theme you've either cheated Or you're really bad with creative integration either way Don't be that person having done the 48 hour game jam in the past the number one thing that I learned is that you want To go to your core game features around what you currently know and save all Experimental ideas for your polish that way you don't burn through half of your jam time on stackoverflow on YouTube leaving no time to polish your game if you even finish it that is so Here was my game idea It was gonna be a simple survivor RTS game you start with the main power hub and you place down transmission towers and ask me in a range of either another tower or The main power hub in order to be part of the network And if so the nearest source will send energy to it if a tower has energy it can do one of three things each Tower Prioritizes using it over sending it or restoring you which to use it an enemy has to be in range of that tower But if not in range then every tower will send energy if its neighboring towers are asking for it But if not being asked then the tower will simply store the energy for future use the enemies will be on a simple path landing Course to your main power hub and when they reach your power Hope they will subtract life from me very fitting for the theme of transmission I thought because the main part of the game is about transmitting energy.
Oh, and this idea was heavily inspired by a game called Creeper World Check out that tight game if you haven't heard of it I had full confidence that could have had this prototype working in the first 24 hours leaving the rest of the time for polish But when it came time to present ideas in front of everyone first off we were only given like 20 seconds to pitch our game ideas and somehow it seemed like most of the teams were formed before the presentations even began so I was stuck with the choice of either working on a game on my own or Join another team and help them with their game pitch and as much as I really wanted to make this game I didn't pay $40 just to sit in the corner making game by myself for two days hell I produce a weekly Software show and I can do my own 48 hour game jam for free if I really wanted to and so without hesitation I decided to join another team and that team was called the free agents here was their game idea a randomly generated city is created With a transmission tower in the center of the city survivor groups are placed at random edges of the city And you playing as a tower Transmitting directions to all survivor groups that help them reach the center Tower and the challenge comes from zombies following each survivor group leaving deadly tron-like trails behind them not a bad pitch at all we found a place to set up and call home for the next couple of Days, but not this spot though.
We didn't like this spot this spot.
It was much better I clicked the commander's helm not really but I enjoyed teasing everyone with that line we set up our sleeping stations then got to work on ironing out the details for this project How features would work who would do what? Plan B's those type of things Then once it was all figured out and we all got to work there were six on our team five of which were Programmers and the last of which was a music producer and the work was broken apart like so you all know what the music video Took care of for this game project obviously So the programmers programmer number one worked on the procedural map generation feature Programmer number two worked on the camera controls and character models programmer number three worked on the user interface programmer number four worked on the visual effects and quality assurance and programmer number five – didn't want worked on the user input in AI and That was pretty much it for day one for the rest of the night We just worked on our respective duties there was nothing really exciting to see I wanted to sleep at about 7:30 a.
m.
And we'll crack up at 9:45 a.
m.
To begin day two and yes I was dying day two we started off with little breakfast They serve Spanish eggs sausage and potatoes, and it was pretty good But then we got right back to work and finally had some stuff to show my contribution was working like a charm Everything was responding perfectly behaving as expected until I linked my features with other team features It completely broke And it costed me Hours to find out why it broke? And if you're curious to know what happened my entire future was based on Ray casting and the raycast were going right under all colliders returning no collisions And when I received the first version of the procedural map it was different than when I was Testing my ray cast feature on just wanted a little small yet very important details to go uncommunicative when working with the team valuable lesson learned check for team changes before rewriting entire scripts The rest of that was pretty straightforward we all worked on a respected features with the only break for dinner They were serving 7up and gamer girl boosts their brain performance snacks for the diehard gamers that we were Not really, they actually serve chicken mashed potatoes and veggies after inhaling that.
It was right back to future building I specifically was putting a lot of time into building the AI feature, but then Disaster hit at about 4 a.
m.
on day 2 We were all working on a respective builds for hours at this point without linking them together and it turned out that some overlapping edits happen to scripts and whatnot and because we're using the unity version control when something like that happens you have to choose either one or the other and This cost my entire AI featured to be overridden and completely lost so On that note.
I just closed my computer and went to sleep feeling defeated well actually before I went to sleep I was gonna have a good night leak and found this chameleon hiding in the bathroom I gotta say pretty good camouflage chameleons, but you're not fooling me no no no Never got 9 a.
m.
.
The next day.
We were all back at it again I was rebuilding AI feature and others were working on their respective Features at about noon we all get together and start to focus on the final final build that included lots of QA reporting for bugs adding polish oh, and yeah We modified the forest model for this project due to time constraints so if you play it all the zombie models are actually modified dead forest models Guess forest didn't have a good post-career 5 o'clock rolls around and it was time to put our game onto a flash drive and demo it now Here is a completed game as Explained in the beginning you start off with X amount of survivors randomly placed in the randomly generated city and the more survivor groups that you have the harder the Difficulty is all survivor groups can move in certain directions depending if there's free space in that direction or not But because some directions can lead your survivor groups into a trap you need to pay attention Your objective is to lead as many survivor groups as possible into the center for the transmission tower is and the challenge comes from multitasking these survivor groups in avoiding zombie trails Our global Game Jam set up a little playroom for all the demos to be showcased, and I was pretty impressed music plays There were a lot of really cool games made in 48 hours a couple of people came over to play our game which was a Pretty cool thing to watch and to talk to them about the game We made over two days and after about maybe 45 to 60 minutes of this we headed back to our space to begin packing up and head home and Just like that.
It was pretty much over it a little more anti-climatic than I was expecting Although they did bring us back into the theater room and gave us in 10 seconds to talk about our game I kind of wish they used the dimmer one time instead of two presentations Especially when I could have downloaded any of the games made and played them in my own time I was really interested if your teams talked about the ups and downs of making their games But you know all in all I enjoyed the experience it gave me a great opportunity to meet five really talented Individuals and make a game with him in 48 hours.
It was a lot of fun I learned a lot from the experience and most importantly my curiosity was fed.
Oh And when I got home from the game jam that was maybe the best night's sleep.
I've ever got alright guys I hope that you enjoyed this week's episode our global game Gem game is up for download as well as open source links are in the description please do me a huge favor and subscribe to my channel if you haven't already hit that Bell icon for notifications for when I upload again leave a like on this video and lastly come follow me on social media for like Exclusive updates and whatnot alright guys that is all from me I will see you all next week, but remember to always be new curiosity.
