July 2, 2018 - GDQ One Mechanic Game Jam #4
Over the weekend, Friday, June 29, through July 1, 2018, I signed up to participate in Game Dev's Quests One Mechanic Game Jam #4. A few months ago I tried to do OMG Jam #3 but I failed miserable under very similar circumstances, because there always seems to be a bbq or a party of some sort that breaks up my weekend and derails my progress.
Taylor of Game Dev's Quest announced the themes early so I thought I had a chance to get a head start. But for some reason no ideas came to mind until Friday around noon I was taking a walk and I decided right then and there that my game would involve some sort of slicing or chopping mechanic.
So, basically it would be using the same cutting scripts or "engine" that I've been developing for the past 6 months. Yes, in some other game jams this would be frowned upon but fortunately the GDQ guys just want to encourage people to make games. Thank goodness for that because there's almost no chance that I could come up with a game from scratch in just 3 days. And I barely made it...
I had to go to an all-day bbq on Saturday and that night I passed out from the heat, food, and wine.
Oh, and a lot of time was spent trying to figure out how to publish things on itch.io and testing builds for Windows *and* Mac. Well, making a Windows version is a given, but since I spend most of my time on a mac and this was developed on a mac I had to make the mac version. I really wanted to make it a WebGL build but the cutting mechanism didn't work, maybe it just needed to have more RAM allocated to it but I didn't have time to figure that out.
Anyway, I slapped some background music in there and drew a horrible mouth drawing, added sound effects and built, built, built, compressed, downloaded, tested... And I finally called it done... -ish
And here it is:
I hate the stupid name though LOL!
Here's the video so you don't have to play it if you don't want to:
My biggest take-away from this game jam experience, other than how much work is actually involved in game development, is that I finally published a game in an online marketplace. Now that I know it's this easy I can start posting some of my VR experiments and get feedback from them.
Taylor of Game Dev's Quest announced the themes early so I thought I had a chance to get a head start. But for some reason no ideas came to mind until Friday around noon I was taking a walk and I decided right then and there that my game would involve some sort of slicing or chopping mechanic.
So, basically it would be using the same cutting scripts or "engine" that I've been developing for the past 6 months. Yes, in some other game jams this would be frowned upon but fortunately the GDQ guys just want to encourage people to make games. Thank goodness for that because there's almost no chance that I could come up with a game from scratch in just 3 days. And I barely made it...
Friday
So on Friday I dropped everything and got to work on the new food chopping game since Food, Gravity, and Loot were the themes to choose from. And since chopping was the mechanic I had to figure out a way to port the super hacky meshcut scripts I've been destroying for the past 6 months over to a new project. Long story short, I almost gave up on the idea altogether but I managed to get it working after about 6 grueling hours of development. What I ended up with was a conveyor belt, some cubes, a loaf of bread and a cutting device:
Saturday
On Saturday morning I managed to squeeze in a tiny amount of work making it easier to modify the conveyor belt movement. It had previously been a script on every single link of the conveyor belt, but now it's a script on the gameObject that encloses the conveyor belt links. This would help me make changes more quickly later on...I had to go to an all-day bbq on Saturday and that night I passed out from the heat, food, and wine.
Sunday
Sunday morning I felt terrible, I can't stand this hot weather! So, I basically typed up a note saying I guess I'm a failure on the GDQ discord and Taylor said I should post it anyway... For some reason that's all I needed to hear because I spent like the next 8 hours adding sound effects, a big mouth, a scoring mechanism -ish, changing the camera angle, and well, just trying to make sure it felt fun even if it wasn't really a finished game...Oh, and a lot of time was spent trying to figure out how to publish things on itch.io and testing builds for Windows *and* Mac. Well, making a Windows version is a given, but since I spend most of my time on a mac and this was developed on a mac I had to make the mac version. I really wanted to make it a WebGL build but the cutting mechanism didn't work, maybe it just needed to have more RAM allocated to it but I didn't have time to figure that out.
Anyway, I slapped some background music in there and drew a horrible mouth drawing, added sound effects and built, built, built, compressed, downloaded, tested... And I finally called it done... -ish
And here it is:
I hate the stupid name though LOL!
My biggest take-away from this game jam experience, other than how much work is actually involved in game development, is that I finally published a game in an online marketplace. Now that I know it's this easy I can start posting some of my VR experiments and get feedback from them.
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