First Jam Learnings


First of all, it was fun and at the same time tiring since I was doing solo. And since I don't have any experience in game jams so I decided to participate initial game jams as solo before participating in teams later on. And I didnt knew what aspects I was supposed to work on. I was tempting to do everything yourself so I realized it was a no brainer move. So I did mostly programming and I kept most of the visuals/art simple using basic shapes. For this I use a cube as my player hehe silly me. I decided for a simple 2d game. I mainly focused more on understanding the entire loop and system which are involved in a game. Level design, art design, sound design, UI design, gameplay design and lot more. Though I didn't fully focused on every aspect since it was a 3 day jam and its literally impossible to cover aspect in your game unless you are working in a team. 

The key learnings and achievements were:

  • Firstly, I made a game. Not a game I would be too proud of but a game which I can claim I made with my vision and choices. Cant say I made the game myself since I used assets from other people so yeah. 
  • Secondly, I learned game dev is not easy. It will become easy with time and experience. And those who make good games in short times are awesome. Perhaps if I want a thing in life one would be to work with such people if I can. 

Flaws/Drawbacks I found were:

  • Firstly, I did a big mistake for not releasing the jam submission in web platform. And because of that, very few people actually played the game and got very few concrete feedbacks for the game. 
  • Secondly, the game lacked smooth feedbacks. For example, scene transitions were stiff without any change animation or anything.
  • And most importantly I didn't explained the gameplay rules and controls in the beginning of the game. I did made the controls and rules page but I should have displayed the same during the initial level or something which made the gameplay confusing of most people who played the game. 
  • Player action feedbacks were lacking. For example if player health is decreasing it is shown in UI but no sound or anything haptic feedbacks are given when the player is literally dying and because of which some didnt realize their health was reducing and reported to have died for no reason. 
  • Also the UI button feedbacks were missing, you couldn't say if you have clicked a button and it didn't work since I never implemented any sort of button animation or sounds for triggering any button event. So yeah that aspect was also neglected due to limited time. 

    I will say though I learned a hell lot of these 3 days. I created certain scripts from scratch like weaponController, playerMovement scripts which I can tweak and use it in my future projects and what not. And I'm quite sure, the more I make games the more reusable code I can implement which would further reduce my programming time and would allow me to focus on other aspects of game where I lack so yeah it was a great memorable experience and I hope to improve even greater heights as time moves on. 

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