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| Our game's title screen! |
tl;dr: I participated in a game jam with some friends, and we made a cool game!
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Jamming with friends
Global Game Jam is an annual event where people all over the world create a game in under 48 hours. Additionally, the games all follow some central theme, which is only announced at the start of the jam.
I formed a group with some friends—Connie, Daisy, and Zaven. We made a fun game about a cute yellow slime character that is trying to collect little bits of itself without losing too many more bits along the way!
Coming up with a name was really hard. We eventually decided on "OoboloO". We were thinking something sounding like "blob" might be nice, and we thought that adding the extra "o"s sorta reflected the central game mechanic of scattered little round pieces of the character.
Here are some screenshots from OoboloO!
Software used
Lessons learned
I feel like our experience working as a group was probably pretty standard.
- Brainstorming and designing things with other folks can take a lot more time than when you are the sole decision maker, but you get a lot of better ideas with more heads in the room!
- There is more time spent blocked while waiting for someone else to implement something that's important for your next task. This was especially significant at the start, but continued to be somewhat of an issue throughout.
- In particular, it would have been nice to get started on level design earlier if we had finalized player movement and some key infrastructure bits a little sooner.
- You get much better art when you work with a real artist!
- Game development is a fun process of exploration and discovery, and it's a lot of fun to have teammates to share that with.
🎉 Cheers!
This game is very cute and also hard. My experience with platforming games pretty much begins and ends with Super Mario Bros though.
ReplyDeleteI made it to level five ... I think. I feel like there was a trick on the fourth level that I didn't figure out and so maybe I cheesed it. It took me a while on the second level to figure out I could press up repeatedly to go higher. I have no clue how to proceed on the fifth level.
Great work!
:) Woohoo!
DeleteYeah, I thought we made it pretty hard too. I think it's pretty easy to forget that most people won't be as good at the genre you're excited about as you are.
FWIW, I never actually beat level 5 until about an hour ago, and Roy sent us a recording of him beating level 5 in about 5 seconds, shortly after we first uploaded the game...
The levels were a lot of fun to design!
This is a really fun game. I also found some of the solutions a bit challenging, but I figured it out in the end. Not sure if I did it in the intended way though :)
ReplyDelete:) I'm glad you liked it! Yeah, I think our level design was definitely oriented more toward experienced platformers.
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