Suddenly homeworks! also gamejam review.

So we finally got proper home works, which is why i’m taking the time to write this as a way of procrastination. I’ll make sure to make a blog post that the end of the week to write down what I’ve accomplished in the week.

Anyways, last Friday we had the game jam, and boy did we fail. Well sort of at least.

Our game was the space shooter where you couldn’t shoot properly, and there was no ammo count. We ran out of time and didn’t manage to implement certain things that would have been vital to making the game readable and fun in general.

• The ammo regenerated slowly up to six shots in the player’s store, which we did not manage to show on screen in any way. this was due to out limited knowledge of gamemaker and running out of time.
• The same goes for actual lives being shown on the screen.
• Upon hitting the buildings they were supposed to be gradually destroyed on each hit. then we just wanted to make them be on fire. But we ran out of time.
• The missiles were supposed to play an explosion animation when colliding with the comets but we deemed this less important and it went into the “if we have time for polish”-pile
• Same goes for making the flames behind the comets animate and giving the missiles a firing sound

All in all we thoroughly messed up the handling of work time while implementing things into the game. I will say though, that if any of us had had experience with gamemaker we could have had a working prototype way faster and been able to add all the basic stuff and maybe even some polish.

I also want to note that out artists did a splendid job with the sprites for the game and that anything not being implemented was all due to us programmers not being able to gamemaker. 

As for the experience of actually working in a group designing a game i enjoyed it. Myself having no experience with gamemaker and two other in the group already on it i figured it wouldn’t be very effective if i made my own third version on my own computer as it already took a lot of effort to synchronize the two versions we had, so what i ended up doing was to sit between the two and trying to help as much as i could. I also tried to sort of keep a bird’s eye view of the work of everyone and keep track of what needed doing the most. In the end, i hope i was more useful than i felt and that the game would have been worse without me.

But at least we had fun working on the game and hopefully that stands for something.