Two days to make this game for the ScoreSpace Jam

WHY? I’m relatively new to game jams, with only one under my belt. My plan is to participate in several and get a feel for the Gamedev experience. I didn’t think I would be able to complete the jam in the allocated 72 hours. But it was an interesting experiment and I secluded myself for 48 hours to make the game. 48 because I had appointments and busy work to deal with during the first day. Hence I started the Jam in hard mode.

Challenges I went in solo. I could have found someone to help, but I wanted to test my ability to make a game under pressure. My skills: Programming, game design, and problem solving. My non-skills: art and music. This would be a challenge. I had to think of an idea and either draw something like a 5 year-old or get my hands on some assets.

GameJam The game Jam was really fun to do. The pressure to do it in a few days added to the challenge and kept me completely aware of everything I was doing. Picking a game idea from the theme was a challenge in itself. My mind kept trying to make a speedrun game. It could have worked, but I wanted to focus on getting points.

Frustrations Working with pixel art required heavy research. Although it is easy to add pixel art assets with unity, It is not easy to make it look right. The primary issue was the resolution, if you don’t set this right, the pixels will appear squashed and weird. Add to this that the UI elements pixels need to match correctly two, and that required a bunch of experimentation to get it to work as best as possible. On top of everything, is that the UI started to mess about when uploading the game to Itch.io.

Things to Improve I wanted the guard to be able to interact with the environment so that the prisoners could be more manageable. The prisoners had a smart(ish) AI that had them mostly run away from the guard, but I did not implement a way for them to find an exit. I also wanted to add more exits, but then the game wouldn’t have been manageable without a way to move the guard between floors quickly. Honestly, had I had a few more hours, I would have added the elevator and the other exits, plus better warnings on when an exit was opening.

Overall All in all, I am quite satisfied with the game I made. It played and felt like I wanted it too. I’ll get some more work done on it to finish it. And leave it at that.

If you like this game and like my style, follow me here on itch or on Twitter at @Tabandija. I plan to make plenty of fun games like this.