Lost in Time

GameJam Aug 2020

Theme: "Rewind"

Hosted by Brackeys

This was my first GameJam experience. I decided to finally try one only after I had at least a little bit of knowledge about the process. Using Discord for communications and Unity's built-in Teamwork Management framework, our team of three completed this project from scratch in just seven short days.

While it's not something I'm very proud of, I did learn a lot doing it. Working with a team, keeping to a schedule, and exporting the final project were most important.

The Opportunity

We decided to use the same level for three different iterations in order to reinforce the theme of the Jam. The idea is that the Player must find the scattered time fragments (represented by floating portals) and fix their time machine. Unfortunately with our time constraints of only a week, we could not convey that information clearly in the game. What we ended up with was a very short arcade experience of moving to the portal while easily avoiding some basic enemies.

The Challenges

The biggest challenges our team faced was managing roles and creating a unifying file structure. We each worked on our own part of the project and so we each created our own individual files & folders that were not adhering to a standard framework. This created disorganization as I often found myself wondering what a script was even responsible for, or which object was using it. In the end I simply trusted my team members and kept to my own folder.

What I Learned

File Structure And Pipeline

Keeping multiple developers up to date and synchronized was a challenge we immediately had to solve, before we could even start work on the project. Github was suggested, but we decided to try Unity's built-in solution instead. It definitely helped alleviate the problem, but we still had a few issues due to our lack of organization. I learned from this project how to effectively separate and group so that I can easily locate them in the future.

UX Design

I was excited when I realized that we had time left over to add a projectile ability. Originally we had no way for the Player to fight back against the enemies, and adding this was a big contribution to the overall experience. I was responsible for its implementation -- Control binding, UI and the like -- and I went the extra mile by adding some delay on the score counter to show a more visual increase in points.

Time Management

Adhering to a deadline is without a doubt beneficial to my personal workflow. I know now that I work more efficiently when there is a definitive end date. For this project, I allotted a number of days to work on different parts. We also used Trello to keep our thoughts organized and have a visual representation of the functionality we wanted to implement. On the last day, the game was finished and we had a bit of extra time to clean up and export.

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