Learning

We had a few goals for this game jam besides just having some fun and working on a short form project.

Our goals were.

• Experiment with hand drawn (programmer) art scanned in as a style.
• Work on narrative with few player verbs.
• Practice level building and design.
• Take it easy and not work too hard. (We did jam for recreation after all)

So ultimately only players will be able to give feedback as to whether or not our goals translated into anything meaningful to them.

Experiment with hand drawn (programmer) art scanned in as a style.

When we decided to jam we knew we would need to come up with a way or representing the game without "real" art. We decided  to use pen on paper drawing as textures and try to mimic a paper look in the game world. This is not a unique style and previously we did in fact use something similar for a game jam, but with "real" artists not us.

Above is a photo of the source pages. Not all of it made it into the game.

What went right  was the speed of the pipeline from art to screen. It's really fast and for a jam that is super useful. Turns out I can draw better than I expected (while still being bad). 

What went wrong. Without any 3D modeling we were using Unity primitives this made texturing frustrating and often we added a lot more geometry then we would have really needed to if we had some 3D models built just for the game. Before we added culling we had 1 million polygons in some views.

What we would have done differently is have a proper scanner and not use a phone camera. Also better control of scale so line thickness is uniform. Lastly a edge filter that expands the drawn look and feel might have added to the look.

We will use this again and even consider it for commercial projects (with real artists). But for a speedy art line in a game jam it's pretty useful.

Work on narrative with few player verbs.

So personally I (Travis) am not a huge fan of making FPS games. I do play a few but I prefer more story driven games. I wanted to explore how we can try to immerse the player in the story using the limited player verbs of an action FPS.

Once I got my head around it, I had a lot of fun working out how to set up situations where the players verb (hit or shoot stuff) would further a kind of story. I am very keen to explore this further. I think it's a good exercise as it's often too easy to just keep adding mechanics to a game when you can't figure out how to arrange the narrative around the verbs you already have.

Practice level building and design.

As always you can not get enough practice building levels. We wanted to make a level repeat back on itself so each time you return to older part's they expand. We wanted it to feel cohesive and immersive while still facilitating the game play.  Lastly we wanted the level to have a tempo and not to just have one speed. I feel we achieved these goals to some degree. There are only two mechanics we used to create zones, a drop off where you can not return and doors that require story progress to open.

The level's were small and cramped at first until we took a little time and built a level editor. It's pretty generic and outputs a JSON multidimensional string array. That time was well worth it. Below is a screen shot of the level editing tool we wrote.

The left half of the current view with a faded out view of the layer below. Top right is above you and bottom right is what's below. Letters translated to prefabs. A small support file allowed us to change the colors of characters to make the visualization easier.

We will be using the editor for future jam projects and even adding a few small things to it.  We really would not have built as nice a level without first making the editor. I won't argue that levels would not be better if built in the scene with specific small tweaks, but for a small team with limited time the trade off is pretty good.

Take it easy and not work too hard. (We did jam for recreation after all)

We certainly achieved this, we worked only after hours and not even at a high burn rate. We worked a bit harder on the two weekends but even then we had time to play some games and spend time with the family. It's nice to do a longer format jam.

Thanks for taking the time to read our blog, we look forward to seeing the feedback on the game.