Game Jam Documentation

 Introduction

Last week I had the opportunity to take part in the Game Jam event as part of my project for Multimedia Development 2.

The event started off with a meeting on Teams from the organisers and going over what the Game Jam is, what is required of us and watching some videos and presentations about how to approach this task.

Our Team

Our team was made up of two CDM students, myself and Aaron Carton, and two Language and Business students from Grangegorman Campus, Rachael Kavanagh and Ivano De La Groterria.

Myself and Aaron took on the role and responsibility of  coding and developing the game while the two language students were tasked with providing us with words and phrases to use in our game.

Organisation and planning

After the official meeting with the organisers, our team had a short and brief meeting on Teams to brainstorm what we could do for our game. For the meeting only myself and Aaron showed up as Rachael was in work and we could not get a hold of Ivano.

Aaron and I went through a few ideas and ended up deciding to make a game where you are given a question with a few different choices and you have to choose the right answer to the question.

The following day we had another meeting so we could inform the others on our idea and get some feedback and possibly more ideas from them but again Ivano was not reachable but myself, Aaron and Rachael agreed on the previous idea.

Aaron decided to go off and start off the project by creating a basic playable version and then it was up to myself to add the mechanics of the game and the different pieces of script while the language students were tasked to come up with words and phrases to put in the game. 

Process and Production

As stated above, I was tasked with coding the different mechanics and levels for our game. I was given the basic game 'skeleton' by Aaron and then I decided to go off and try to add some placeholder text that could be changed later once the language students provided the actual words and phrases that we were going to use.

Above you can see the basic framework I was given along with the placeholder text in Romanian with some animals as clues for the correct answer.

What I was trying to achieve here is that the player character would shoot a ball at one of the animals, destroying the animal and depending on what animal the player destroys, the answer would either be correct or incorrect.

Next I attempted to create a different level and this is where the problems came up.

Above you can see the code for the 'loadLevel' script. You would load into the next level after destroying the correct animal and the next level would load up.

At a first glance you might think that the 'Collider2D' would be why the code is not working but I tried changing that to a normal 'Box collider' with no results. This is where the problems came in.

I was faced with the problem of the 'loadLevel' not working properly and also the problem of not being able to figure out how to make the text appear upon destroying the correct animal.

I tried getting the help of Aaron on this but he was also stumped and we were mere hours before the game was meant to be uploaded.

As a last ditch effort Aaron and I created a different kind of game.

We decided to create a quiz style game. This was not what we wanted to create but this is what we had to upload.

Lessons learned

From this experience the one major thing I have learnt is to not decide on something too ambitious that you do not know how to do and just hope you can do it as this was ultimately our downfall.