Overview

Continuing on with game jams, I’ve completed two more games, Galaxy Gauntlet and Twisted Twilight. Despite the intentions expressed in my previous post, I didn’t stream the development for either of these. This is mostly due to reasons I discussed in that post, I just wanted to make rapid progress and didn’t want to be slowed down by streaming. I think longer term projects in the future will be better suited to streaming because there will be less time pressure.
I’m skipping past writing about Orcs and Doors for now. My plan for 2021 is to upgrade some of these game jam games to more complete projects. I’m not sure which games I’m going to upgrade yet other than that I know for sure I will be upgrading Orcs and Doors. I’m going to write a post reflecting on that and my plans for the upgrade development around when start development on the upgrade. Not sure for now exactly when that will be, I might upgrade other games first but I will eventually be upgrading Orcs and Doors.

Galaxy Gauntlet

Playable in Browser Here
Weekly Game Jam 175 – “Two-Button Physics”

For Week 175 – “Two-Button Physics”, I worked on a twin-stick shooter where you can use the triggers to suck the enemies to either side of the arena. I really enjoyed working on this game. I like twin-stick shooters, I played a lot of Geometry Wars when I was younger and recently picked up Debris Infinity on Switch. I think twin-stick shooter is a great genre for a game jam because it’s pretty easy to get the core mechanics up and running very quickly.

This was the first jam I didn’t work solo. I teamed up with Austin Blau, who worked on the music and sound design. I was really happy with his work. Not only did working together save a lot of time that I would have spent looking for free audio, but it was really nice to have high quality audio made specifically for this game. Unfortunately my knowledge of audio in Unity is very limited, and the most I’ve really done is tweak simple properties like pitch or volume. There seems to be a solid library of audio components and all I’ve ever used is AudioSource. As I continue to work with composers and sound designers, it seems like it would be valuable to better familiarize myself with the advanced features of the Unity audio system.

The main thing I’d want to fix in an upgraded version of this game is the controls. No one complained about them in the comments and I can’t put my finger on exactly what’s wrong with them but some aspect of them doesn’t feel as tight and responsive as it could. I think it might have something to do with incorrect mixing of Update and FixedUpdate functions, that’s probably the first place I’ll look to try to figure out this issue for the upgraded version. I think this game would also benefit from more variety in enemy types and better spawning behavior. One gameplay problem I noticed from feedback is that hugging the walls and staying in the corners is much safer than being in the middle. I think certain spawning behavior, like spawning in a ambush circle around the player, could make the corners feel less safe. Also, it might be worthwhile to have some incentive to go into the middle of the map, like powerups.

Twisted Twilight

Playable in Browser Here
Weekly Game Jam 176 – “Charge”

Twisted Twilight had even more collaboration, I brought in a friend to do some design stuff. This brought another person in to the functional aspects of the game which introduced new problems. We had an initial meeting to discuss the game concept and I tried to translate that into a very specific feature list. However, some features the designer was expecting were not included in the list and therefore not completed in time. This forced us to pivot twice to better align the design plans and available tech. In the future, I’ll have to be more careful to ensure my teammates and I are on the same page with regard to features.

In terms of potential improvements, we’d probably first look to lengthen the game. This would mean a larger house to explore, more little puzzles and interactions, and probably some story elements. Another change would be removing the flashlight charge. We discussed this during development; having a charge on the flashlight went against our desire to encourage the player to explore the house. We decided not to remove it because we thought it would stray too far from the game jam theme of “charge”, as the charge of the flashlight was the main aspect of the game satisfying that theme. Maybe we should have just had the flashlight regain power over time. That way, it still has a charge that needs to be managed but there’s no rush to race to the end of the game.

Looking Forward

I’m going to do two more weekly jams in December. I’ve actually already done one of them because I’m writing this conclusion a week after I wrote the rest of this. I might continue to do game jams a bit into 2021 but I’ll want to transition to longer term projects at some point relatively soon. This will either be longer-term game jams or upgrading existing game jam projects.