My first game jam was in-person!
We made a dog-walking game in 48 hours.
About half a year ago in March, I was invited to a game jam hosted by Screen Queensland as part of their Season of The Dev series of events.
This blog post is a brief summary of the jam’s outcome. Please watch the YouTube video for a more detailed telling of the event.
This game jam was special, as it was a local event. It took place in a bungalow park in the Sunshine Coast and all attendees had to pay a $20 entry fee. In return, we got three days (two nights) of accommodation, food, and an entire venue for ourselves to develop games in. Sweet deal.
Our game
I was teamed up with three other people: Jess (programmer), Rohan (artist/musician), and Carlos (artist). I played the role of a second programmer.
We had 48 hours to make a game after being given the theme words “astonishing”, “beach”, and “connection”. To that, we made Puppy Love.
It’s an infinitely-scrolling (not actually) game where you are a dog being walked on a beach. Your goal is to pull your owner around to pick up good objects, avoid bad obstacles, and socialise with other dog walkers. The premise is inspired by the movie 101 Dalmatians.
But it’s really buggy and hard to understand.
Our code was such a mess that bugs were popping up everywhere and we couldn’t fix them. We spent a lot of time trying, but that didn’t leave us enough time to finish the game or even test if it was fun. The biggest offenders were the terrain generation system and the physics around the player movement.
We obviously didn’t win. I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that we made the worst game in the entire event. But it was our team’s first game jam, and at least we showed up.
…
And again, $20 for accommodation and food. Holy crap.