Next mission: entering a game jam
A New Year resolution of mine for this year has been to make something. Get back to writing consistently. Keep doing graphic design and open commissions for it. Try to make videos or essays on the medium you love so much. Or…
Make a game. Even if it’s small and is halfway broken, try it. There’s no better teacher than experience, so I made it a goal to make one this year. Eventually. During the summer, for sure. That winter break period would be perfect to try this out.
Something came up, though, an opportunity you could say. To be frank, I am a huge procrastinator (have you seen my backlog), but in another personal goal to be more present in the life that I live, I can’t keep turning down things that I don’t believe I’m ready for because by the time I know I am, they’ll have passed me by. But as a compsci major sophomore, there’s so much schoolwork to keep up with, not to mention games to study, books to read, stories to write, tournaments to run, and life to live. This could backfire terribly, like, really terribly.
I’m entering a game jam. Let’s talk about it.
“All Eyes on Me”: Setting the Stage
Let’s try to set the stage. There’s a game development club at my university called VGDO: they’re pretty chill people, and I’ve been meaning to go since I started last fall but never really found the time to visit. After some New Year reflection, though, I strapped my coat up and decided to visit, and for once in my life, it was just in time. “Our annual game jam kicks off next week!”
I sat up. This could be really fun to enter. While working on this new website and blog, while there have been challenges, it’s honestly been a really cathartic experience for me to delve into a project again; this could be this month’s fixation, and it’s relevant to something I’d want to do.
The theme was announced today: “all eyes on me.” Beyond a few other points mentioned during the recap (must be a student/alumni, use any engine, how scoring works, etc.), there was no other guidance.
When I found out about the jam, I had some blank scratch paper-ass ideas in mind. “What about using Pico-8 to make this and keep scope small?” “What’s a good schedule to make this game?” “How cooked am I?”
Scratch Paper
In the hours since the announcement and going off what I had posted before, I think I know what I want to do.
- Definitely not a platformer or at least only a platformer. This is a genre of game I’ve made in test projects before, and while I could hone in and make something really good, I think it’d be way more fun to make something unique. Something unexpected that I can delve into.
- I’ll probably use Pico-8 for this game. It could’ve been a good opportunity for more Godot practice, but given that I only have a month and knowing my perfectionist tendencies, it’s probably for the best to keep the scale limited graphically and sonically. Plus, while it’s been years since I’ve used Lua, I do have experience with it from the (new) Roblox Studio days, so I hope we’ll be okay.
- A focus on replayability. I only have a month to work on this, and I believe going for a strong core gameplay loop that’s replayable is the best way to make an impression gameplay-wise. That leaves me with either an arcade-style game or a search-action genre, probably. Or maybe…
Going In Blind
Since I found out about the game jam, I’ve had one terrible idea in mind: go in blind into a genre you don’t know that well. Any reasonable person would say this is a terrible idea, and I concur, but I think this could be a really good way to learn and do something I’ve never explored before.
While the world of shoot-em-ups isn’t super well talked about these days, it’s been a recent want of mine to explore an era of gaming before the one I grew up with (around the millennium onwards, give or take), back when game design principles for 2D and 3D experiences were still being written and where limitations bred unique solutions more often. I’ve obviously played shmups before, but it’s a part of gaming I’ve overlooked for a while. Approaching game development from that lack of perspective may be transformative, both in appreciating the genre itself and in better understanding the craft that goes into making these. I generally tend to be a fan of arcade-y, replayable action games like Bayonetta or search-action games that encourage full completion in a restricted time frame like basically all the Metroid games, so that should help me.
Given the theme of “all eyes on me,” I immediately think of visibility, the casting of light, and the feeling of being watched, making you small. In that interpretation, I have quite a few ideas on how a shmup could take that concept and run with it:
- enemies with short-ranged “flashlights” that can only be hit within the flashlight: get up close and risk being hurt but be paid off with energy
- environment could be on a desolate planet that the player explores, similar to a metroidvania/search-action game, with holes of light from the sun poke through the planet
- a concept to switch between light/dark environments similar to Ikaruga’s polarity to attack enemies
What next?
I’ll be keeping a devlog on here as I make progress. I can’t promise daily progress updates, but it’ll be at least once or twice a week. Next stop is the game design document to actually see what we can make, the scope the project will have, and whether we have the skills to take it further.
Until then, however, and while you’re asking questions, I’ll leave off with some answers!
- What will you call it? No idea. Skiptrace is calling out to me and would fit the surveillance theme, but I’m not stuck with it.
- Will you play shmups for research? At some point during the development, I will, though I would want to see how I’d fare to make it to the first prototype without that experience.
- Why record this? As someone who’s been interested in gamedev their whole life, seeing other people’s videos or written devlogs has inspired me countless times and given me a really unique, impactful insight that focused design/principle-related research doesn’t. I’d want to leave the same thing behind for someone else to read and see how some scrappy college student figures this all out.
- Will we be able to play it? Yes! Whatever I get that’s playable by the time the jam is finished, I will host it on itch.io for you lovely folks to be able to play it!
- Will it be good?
See you next mission, everybody!
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