Game Jam Haunted: Postmortem and Continuation Strategy

07/14/15

So, there was a 30-hour game jam last Sunday that I wrote a few posts on.

The "game" will be here eventually. I didn't get very far.

I'm going to keep working on it though, I like the idea. Basically, it's just going for the fun of the Donkey Kong Country cart levels (like this one, for example). Though, I believe this game will have one-button controls when it is done (which I suppose will lend it well to a mobile experience).

To fit with the theme of "haunted", it'll be a haunted roller-coaster ride.

Though, I wouldn't mind expanding it further if I end up getting that far, I think.

Anyways, let's dive into specifics.

Post-Mortem of the Jame Itself

I made several key mistakes, and also just didn't have much energy during the main day of the jam. The first major mistake was looking for a new engine to try out as the game-jam started. I was curious as to what HTML5 game-engines had server-side node.js support built in. Looking explicitly for that led to the Isogenic Game Engine (IGE).

The engine is actually pretty cool looking. Playing around with it the little bit that I did made me think it would have some interesting design philosophies to introduce me to.

The problem was that my reasons for looking into it had literally nothing to do with the kind of game I was making. I did not, in any way, need a game-engine with server-side support, and so node.js support was completely unnecessary.

What I needed was something that would lend itself well to a game with a lot of left/right/up/down velocity with a good feel of momentum and a good feeling jump. That's what I should've looked for if I wanted to try out a new game engine. Some sort of action-based engine with some decent momentum physics.

I couldn't even figure out a quick, easy way to implement jumping. Something that's really trivial in Crafty, and so I switched to Crafty.

Too little, too late.

This is a valuable lesson. The lesson I took away from it until just now was that I should just stick to crafty unless I have a specific reason to look elsewhere. The new lesson, after having written out my mistake, is that I should look for a tool that helps me do what I want to do and not look for a tool that I think might be useful to know in the future but has nothing to do with what I want to do right now.

I think trying out different tools and stuff is totally a valid thing to do, even during short game jams where such exploration has no negative consequences (a game jam that doesn't produce a game is at worst a little demoralizing, but often it provides good context for what not to do in a more serious situation). But, again, searching for something that solves my immediate problems will probably be more productive overall, and let me start with examples and/or tutorials more directly correlated with what I want to accomplish.

Going Forward

I'm going to get as far as I can with crafty, and then I'm going to look for a tool that's good for html5 physics-based games, maybe.

I'm thinking I may end up waiting until QuakeCon before I do any more work, though.

Not really much of a plan going forward....

I'll work on that.