I just had the pleasure of participating in Global Game Jam 2016 at Lyto HQ, Jakarta. It was an event where we made a team of random people that we barely knew and create a game within 48 hours.
It was fun, the constraints made me think differently in term of game production, we do not have time to worry about quality and visual, what we can only do is creating a Gameplay that are both fun and solid within the limited time.
What we made in GGJ 2016 is a game titled “Golden Rush“, a third person Platformer game using Unreal Engine 4, we created 21 challenging levels and we were pretty happy with the result, some people tried our game and the response are quite nice, we felt that there are still many things that can be tweaked to make the game a little bit better but alas there are just no time for it in the event, what we really proud of is that the game is a complete game, it has all the core features that we have planned for it and more.
It is my first Game Jam ever since I pursued a career in game development. And in this event I learned that:
- Making game with a very limited resources, especially time, needs a careful planning including a deep understanding of the team’s capability and a clear vision of the game that we want to create.
- Make priorities! there are so many things to do but the most important things must take the first priority, they should not be at the mercy of those that have lesser importance. In the case of Golden Rush, implementing game mechanics was our top priority and we nailed it down in the first few hours, but after that there are many distraction such as improving the visual or the UI which I think are not as important as tweaking the gameplay elements for this particular game.
- List features first and try to find out as best as we can if they can be implemented or not within the limited resources that we have. Those that can not be implemented should be cut up front rather than being assumed that we will find a solution during the game development process. The clearer the features the better the game will be.
- Be smart and creative, limited resource should not hinder creativity, it is a challenge to make a fun to play game in this kind of situation.
I would definitely go to this kind of event again in the future, it was exciting, thrilling, and I was able to meet other game developers in Indonesia.
Please check out the game and see if you can defeat one of our team member’s highest score of 1683!
heapcleaner 