Let’s Jam…

The Game Off 2023 jam was my first game jam I participated in and  completed. I think I joined one last year, but exited out due to time constraints. Game development was always a side project/hobby for me that I didn’t have time for (Work, Kids, Playing games…). After playing around with Godot for a couple months and getting pretty comfortable with it, I decided to join a game jam and what better than one put on by github! When it started on November 1st, they announced the theme as “Scale” and my mind began to brainstorm…

The Idea

After taking a few days to go through various ideas, to be honest I was a bit unsure of what to do for “Scale”. So I considered a few things:

• What could I work on that would have some elements I could re-use in the future for other projects?
• What's something I would be excited to work on for the next thirty some days?

The idea started to pop and come together: I love a dungeon crawler, I love well defined roles for party members and of course who doesn’t like slaying an absurd amount of enemies? The idea was starting to take shape, but how can I incorporate “Scale”. I settled on a few things:

1. Give the player a sense of scale in regards to the environment they are in, I thought the camera zooming in and out could help with this. When entering a tunnel, the camera should zoom in real close. When exiting a tunnel into a larger room, the camera should zoom out.
2. Having large amounts of enemies, the amount of enemies scaling as you continue to explore the environment. The idea here being, it should get more and more difficult the deeper you go in the cavern
3. Then finally ending with a giant boss at the end who is physically imposing and causes a lot of mayhem

So my idea was roughly set and it was time to start planning and building!

The Process

I began planning the project out, starting with the systems I would need to test out, like character movement and enemy movement. I created a google doc outlining everything that needed to be done, I would work on this for a few days before I even started building. I was working on it any chance I got, my son’s martial arts class, soccer practice, after dinner and after putting the kids to bed. Least to say I was definitely excited about the project.

Building it out consisted of pretty much the same process, working on it when I could and where I could. My gaming definitely took a hit as a result, but that was quite ok. After seeing the game come together, it turned into probably a project manager's nightmare as ideas would pop in my head and I would say “Can I do that?” and the answer was always almost yes. 

Knowing time is an issue, a lot of these ideas got cut, which is unfortunate but what can you do. The last week and a half I focused on tuning the game and polishing it up and fixing bugs.

The end product

In the end, I am pretty happy with what I produced with the time I had. I learned a lot with Godot which was the primary goal. I also learned a lot about itch.io as I have never really used this site much in the past and I look forward to using it in the future. Here are a few positives and negatives:

Happy with:

• The overall project, it was a great experience from start to finish, glad to have produced something
• The initial implementations of some systems, pathfinding and target acquisition, combat system

What could be better

• The core gameplay, I think there is a fun experience here but could have used a few more iterations with more abilities to mix up the gameplay (Range attacks, Knockbacks, etc…)
• Exploration, there is only one thing to do really. Adding elements to find could easily add another element to it
• The code, towards the end I feel like it got messy
• There is so much I could list here haha

In closing

This was a great experience, I learned a lot with the process and actually produced something in the end. I am already looking for a new jam to join - though I am going to take a break from building and spend some time playing some games in my down time - not to mention try out the other submissions for the jam!

Please provide any feedback if you can, good or bad is appreciated. If you run into any bugs, feel free to reach out on my github or here. I will probably fix them if I have the time to do so :)

Good luck to all the Game Off 2023 participants!