My First Game Jam!

Just like the rest of aspirational game devs on the internet, months ago I got hooked on PirateSoftware's dev advice shorts and streams. I then quickly noticed that he was hosting a two week game jam in January. I already spend plenty of my spare time these days working on a variety of personal dev projects, mostly to learn but also to constantly stretch my creative muscles. So, I decided I should finally partake in one of my major regrets of missed opportunities from my time in college, hunkering down to partake and complete a jam game.

This was also hugely motivated by my recent foray in trying to learn Godot. Its name has been tossed around a lot lately, and during the big unity price debacle last year, video tutorials for it have absolutely exploded online. I was also reminiscing of the few 2D projects I worked on back during college and wanted to try to return the simplicity and accessibility I remembered with 2D prototyping. The great news was I learned quickly that Godot's structure, interface, and built-in scripting language were incredibly accessible for me to learn quickly.

Expecting I'd likely be working solo on this jam, the spare time I had to learn the engine over a month or two actually had me feeling comfortable with the idea I might actually manage to complete something within only two weeks. Ironically after inviting a handful of college friends to join, they surprised me by actually taking up the offer. THOUGH, with a team limit size of 5, and exactly 5 of them wanting to join, I ended up going solo anyway for the sake of not overcomplicating our team make-ups. 
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The theme was announced as "It Spreads" - immediately sparking a handful of ideas to me. Though what I settled on was an idea inspired by a nightmare I had as a kid. An infinite ever-growing black ooze chasing me and my best friend as it spread across the entire world. It fit the theme, I liked the horror, and the idea I thought was an effectively fully-formed concept out of my own memory. Most importantly, I had a decent idea of how to implement the titular mechanic of "spreading ichor", namely by utilizing a tile-based movement system for the core gameplay. I'd never done anything with tiles and Godot clearly has a ton of functionality for it so I leaned in. 
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Two weeks later and I had Ichor to show for it! 

Though "fully-formed" is funny to think back on. In reality I had the concept for a mechanic (the tile-based ichor spreading), a nightmare tone/atmosphere, and a narrative theme? There was no core gameplay loop before I was heads down prototyping. Which I told myself was to see if the core system was even feasibly scriptable with my limited understanding of Godot before "committing" to this pitch. Which was fair, but I really didn't have too much intent to pivot, only intent to learn the scripting until my systems worked. Once it did, I would figure out gameplay from there. The bright side was my "tertiary" mechanic of "also you can push objects" happens to be a quite common one with regard to tile-based game tutorials. So despite my grab-bag of other scripted mechanics (water dissolving the ichor, light freezing it, swapping characters to act as two inventory spaces for picking up and using items like water buckets which could empty and be refilled, etc.), the last few days of "aghhhh what is the core gameplay loop besides the ichor spreads and kills you", quickly slipped into "ah fuck it, its just a sokoban". Spreading ichor and pushing blocks were comforting as my two reliably functioning mechanics as I was crunching to design levels and Paint 3D as many extra environment tiles and object assets before time was up.

​Speaking of which, I think I moderately paced myself as I planned work for these two weeks. 

Until the end of course. I had enough functional mechanics for a game to submit, but I was just REALLY greedy for my tertiary mechanics and a moderate number of decently paced levels (which I for sure shit the bed with regard to pacing  the last two's difficult spike). I did more crunch in those last 3 days than I've literally ever done in my entire professional career (thank god really). Though in that way it also made me sadistically nostalgic for my college days all over again. Working creatively on something I'm passionate about, constantly learning and honing hard dev skills, having the camaraderie of some friends working towards a similar end, and willingly working way more on way less sleep than I ever would in exchange for money. 

It was for sure the closest I've felt to being back to the feeling of working my college senior capstone. A fulfilling, if not exhaustive high I undoubtedly missed. The important differences being (thank god) it was limited to two weeks, and more sadly that I didn't have dev-friends DIRECTLY working by my side through it all. I'll certainly be continuing my own solo personal project work in the mean time, but I did have them promise that should we join another jam under Pirate Software again, I'll make sure to not force myself into solo dev that time around. 

Lastly here's the ITCH page with download file to play and a PLAYLIST I made of various work-in-progress videos of my mechanics scripting. In hindsight I kind of wish I directly blogged each session of work to a new dev-log page publicly here, but my notes in the design doc and videos made to share with friends will have to be it for this time. ADD IT TO THE PILE OF LESSONS FOR NEXT TIME.

PS - big thank you to Emma for the kind favor of providing character art and Ben for allowing me to use his guitar riff audio as the base for tense nightmare background drones. 

PSS - check out the other jam project Ben and other friends of mine also worked on together. Its called Germ Town and its a 3D twin stick about fighting off an infinite horde of multiplying germs.