Christmas Chaos
This week I participated in Secret Santa Jam. Like I explained last time, this was a Secret Santa Jam. Credits to @sheepolution from discord for organising such a kick ass jam. There were no prizes this was game jam made for the christmas spirit of giving. It was organised beautifully. In secret santa, every participant get's assigned a giftee who they are supposed to gift. Which means everyone gets a gift, normally the person gifting knows the giftee (if they want to prepare a personal gift) while the giftee has no idea who their secret santa is. The system placed by sheepolution through the discord bot worked beautifully.
I received the profile of Snax McGee. There were many things in his profile but I focused on his love for synth music, legos, and shooter games. As added bonus I incorporated a picture of his cat and a guitar, as he has a cat and plays the guitar.
The Design
For the game, I decided to make a top-down shooter as the animations would be fairly simple and I enjoyed playing a similar mini-game in Stardew Valley. The person would turn enemies into blocks and snap them together to form different patterns that emerged to be 8-bit images. I decided to stick to the theme of christmas and made everything frosty. He fired a snow canon, the enemies were snowmen who got frozen into blocks of ice. Originally, I planned to make it feel like the main character of the game was ice-skating (improvement for later?).
I decided to use Godot as a game engine as my next big project will be on Godot. I really enjoyed the editor, it's modular design allows you to drag, drop, and jump to different related objects on the editor. This feature was very powerful and made design intuitive.
The Effort
I had been designing and brainstorming the game for weeks. I decided to start development on the 18th Thursday(The Jam ended on the 21st) with Art. I spent the whole day making different assets I was done with all the essentials the next morning. Throughout the weekend I worked on mechanics. I managed to incorporate all the mechanics by Sunday night however, I had not included any sound effects, the game was too plain and was missing audio cues. However, the deadline was 30 minutes away so I decided to make a Web Build.
The Terror
I was developing on my mac. Which meant Apple had to get in the way. I was not able to run the web build locally and did not want to upload it without testing. So I decided to finish adding sound effects and polishing the game a bit more, before I upload it.
The Success
I managed to complete it 24 hrs from the deadline, I hope my giftee did not mind. I am very happy with how it turned out as it included everything that was planned, plus a bit extra. I have not heard back from the giftee but I hope too soon!
Game Link: https://sailboat642.itch.io/snowman-apocalypse
With the end of the jam, I get to go back to my video project.
~sailboat642