Joined Together

After a long break from the previous game jam, I participated in it was time for another one. This time it was the GMTK Game Jam's turn. I've been watching GMTK's videos for a long time and have been learning a lot from the channel. I didn't have a team this time so I hopped on the GMTK team finder website less than 2 hours before the start and found myself a great team of developers.

The theme was Joined Together. After long ideation, we set on what we wanted to make and split the work between ourselves. We were split into multiple timezones so we could even have at least 1 person working on the game at all times.

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Lessons learned

A common struggle in game jams is the integration of all created assets together. Animations, models, scripts, levels. It all needs to be combined in the end to make the game, but because it is a step taken towards the end it is always a problematic one. Early integration is very important but difficult as parts of the game might not be ready earlier. Ultimately, the scope might be the issue. A normal project would have a polishing time in the end after everything has been integrated and game jams rarely do.

The collaboration on Unity scenes definitely got better than my last game jam. We split the level into 3 sections and separate people were working on separate scenes which were then joined together in the end. This definitely reduced the number of Git conflicts we had but there is still room for improvement on the workflow.

The biggest implementation challenge was making the 2 characters work well with every system in the game. There is still some polish to be desired on that front, so if we continue the development the first step would be to improve the integration between the characters and the individual systems.

The game

You can check out the game on gamedemos.noxdew.com.