Gamejam Afterthoughts
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Participated in my first ever gamejam yesterday, and despite it not turning out exactly optimal, it still was one of the most fun things I have ever done. This was also a quite short gamejam, spanning only 7 hours, from 11:00 to 18:00. We were to make a game based on the words everyday and doom, and those two words could be freely interpreted. After some quick scouting around, I made a group together with William Nordin, Simon Strandh, Simon Johansson and Seamus Newman (whose blog I apparently can’t find at the moment), and we started working shortly thereafter. We came up with the idea of a monday simulator, where you would go through the possible events of a very, very bad monday. This included stuff like oversleeping, the internet or the power not working when you want to browse the internet, being out of milk, and having a flat tire when you try to go to the store for more milk. This concept was, to me, quite good. The execution, however, was not. One of the rules of this gamejam was that you could only make this game in Game Maker (GM). As it turned out, only Simon J had any kind of experience working in GM, and that was mostly with 2D sidescrollers. This meant that we were at a severe disadvantage compared to the other groups, who often had a second- or third year student on their teams. Despite this, we gave it our best shot. I feel that our time can be split into 3 “phases”, if you will. The first phase was the “what does this program do”-phase, meaning that during this time, we tried to figure out how GM works at a basic level. The next phase was the “how exactly does this program work”-phase, where we went for a deeper understanding of GM and its code. The last phase was the “why do you not do things like I want you to”-phase, where we tried to apply the things we learned in the first two phases and make a working game, and fail miserably. While I don’t doubt that you can make incredibly awesome things in GM, I felt that the UI was odd and confusing. Being somewhat familiar with coding, I want easy access to scripts and such, aswell as a somewhat decent reference that explains stuff. I probably missed a bunch of stuff in my hurry to make a game, but I feel like that just further proves my point. We had, in my opinion, two major problems. Some time around start of the second phase, we tried running the game on two separate computers at about the same time (making sure that Dropbox had synced the files). On one computer, it worked like we had intended it, while on the other, sprites would be missing and the code would behave differently. We didn’t figure out what caused it, so we just made a new GM project and remade everything. The second problem happened at about 17:50, 10 minutes before the deadline. While putting the finishing touches, the compiled game would just randomly load graphics from an entirely different “room” (or scene as they are called in other engines), with seemingly no relevance whatsoever. This was when we made the decision as a team to just kill it. So what did I learn from this? Two things: 1) You never have enough time. 2) Pick a game fitting your engine if you’re forced to use a specific engine, and the other way around if you’re free. Somewhat long post, well done if you stayed with me through my ramblings.
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