Global Game Jam 2018

Global game jam is my favorite game jam each year because I spend it at university, with friends, and this year, family. My brother decided he wants to study game design so he joined me this year to get some experience.

Before this jam, I decided I wanted to focus on making a game that could be completed by the player. All my projects in the past have either been endless or haven't had any goals to complete.

Global Game Jam is a worldwide game jam that takes place over 48 hours, you can work as teams or alone. My university hosts a site where students can come and participate. This year's theme was "transmission". 

Day 1

Day 1 starts at 6pm after we heard the theme, "Transmission", we immediately start brainstorming ideas, we thought of games to do with car transmissions, shooting data into satellites and a multiplayer game where you would transmit powers between each other to complete puzzles. None of these were used because they either seemed too confusing, or time-consuming. 

After about an hour and a trip to Subway, we managed to think of our final Idea, a game where you would walk along a path and finish puzzles by shooting a ball to manipulate it. There would then be multiple levels in the form of puzzles. 

We talked a bit about what we would need for each level but our idea was quite simple meaning that we could get to work on our tasks quickly. Being able to work with my brother was good because I was able to focus purely on programming the game while he made the assets. This meant we were able to progress a lot faster than if I was making the game alone. 

We decided that the power-ups we wanted for our game were, speed up, slow down, grow, shrink, and jump. 

Something that we decided was that we didn't want any HUD, this would make the game look clean with no clutter on the screen. This meant that the power up selector had to be built into the gun, and all tips had to be shown as text on the walls in the levels.

By the end of the first day, I had implemented all the core mechanics into the game and the common models for our game had been created, this meant that all we had to do now was add progression, and create some levels.

Day 2

When day 2 started I got to work on progression, making it so that the player could get a ball to the finish line and open the door to the next section. I also put together some template levels so that I could test the mechanics myself, these were later adapted to be tutorial levels so that the user can see exactly what each power-up does.

Near the end of the 2nd day, we had a functioning game with most of our levels so we decided to get some playtesting done. Everybody that played the game, loved it, they liked the idea and enjoyed playing, we got some feedback and found some bugs that were then later addressed. 

While playing the game, somebody mentioned that the game would be good for speed running. After hearing his feedback, and because I had little to do at this point, I decided to make a timer mechanic so that players can compete against each other and themselves.

By the time we went to sleep, the timer mechanic was done, however, it didn't show your score on the scoreboard so I could spend the next day focusing on completing the scoreboard, adding sounds, and adding the last of my brother's levels.

Day 3

I started the day focusing on the scoreboard I had started the night before. I had attempted scoreboards in the past with little success. however, after a couple of hours of hard work I managed to get the scoreboard system working, it records your time within the whole game and, to go along with the speed running idea, it shows you your time in each level so that you know where to improve. If your score was in the top 5, you could then add it to the scoreboard.

One thing I am proud of is the final room of the game, It holds all of the scoreboard information as well as other things, without having to create a HUD or menus. This is done by making it look like the walls have the text printed on them.

Once this was completed, I went into a quieter room with my brother and our friend to record some sounds for our game, we decided to include the diversifier, "Beat Box", which requires you to make all game sounds with our bodies, so some sounds are made by tapping our hands, and some with just mouth noises to fit what we wanted the sounds in our game to be like.

All that was left to do now, was add the sounds and final levels into the game, then polish. We managed to finish our game 1 hour before the deadline, this meant we could do a couple of quick playthroughs to search for bugs or problems we hadn't found yet. I am very glad we did this as I hadn't yet tested the levels after putting in the ceilings into the game, this caused a problem where the balls would shoot forwards if spawned inside the ceiling.

End of the Jam

At the end of the jam, there was some playtesting time, this is where everybody with a finished game could set up in the game labs and people could walk around the room and play each other's game, give feedback and vote for their favourite.

It was great seeing people play our game, everybody seemed to love it and some people even got quite competitive, coming back multiple times to re-secure their place at the top of the scoreboard when their time had been beaten. 

Our game was enjoyed so much it managed to get voted first place by the other attendees, this was great considering there were around 20 other teams, some with more members, and more experience. The scoreboard was definitely the feature that made our game win, it made the game replayable, and so much more fun to play as everybody was competing against each other. 

You can find the game here: https://elliot-chester.itch.io/happy-ball