My first Game Jam. And boy, what a jam it was!
Why did I do this?
In fact, my brother who studies computer science asked me if I wanted to participate in the next Ludum Dare.
Game Jams were always an interesting concept but I never dared to participate. I was always afraid of not being of use in the short time.
But I let myself be persuaded (luckily) and so participated in my first Game Jam.
What did I do:
It’s always hard to pin down who worked on what in Game Jam because everyone worked on everything. The overall design we all did together. But my main points were the creation and implementation of the slingshot mechanic and the level design.
While the Slingshot mechanics got off really well, the level design rather less so. It was the first time I was actively involved with level design and well, what can you expect. We sat day 1 and 2 on the idea, the character and the mechanics and then I put the level design together in one day. Basically I tried to consider many aspects, where does the player start, where does he have to go. Of course, most 2D jump & runs start on the left and you have to go to the right. You start at the bottom left and want to go to the top right. And so on.
But the game was perceived as very difficult, mainly because of the difficult level. So what happened?
What did I learn?
As in every project, I learned something here as well. Actually an extremely important factor.
- The mechanics can be as good as they are, without a suitable level design they are useless.
- We had some fine animations, a satisfying slingshot mechanic and funny sound effects. But the game was not the hit. It was too difficult. This was mainly because I didn’t adapt the level design well enough to the mechanics. This could have been found out by several iterations. But there was not time for many iterations.