Or how we made a quite polished game in two-weeks
Prelude
I remember I was going around my usual day of work when Lucas came to me asking for some help with pixel art, something I had done a short online course and some quick arts. Little did I know he was looking for a team to enter a gamejam.
When I found out it was a game jam, my first though was "I don't even know that much about Pixel Art! And I don't want to/can't work like crazy a whole weekend to make a game!".
Anxiety. Of course.
But when I found out this was a different kind of jam and looked at the its page, I immediately changed my mind. Enter "My First GameJam: Winter 2021".
The focus of this game jam is in its name: being the first gamejam you enter. It's not that you can't enter if you're more experienced, but having two weeks to develop a game instead of a weekend made things much easier to get into and find time to do it. Specially when you have lots of other things happening in your life.
So when the day came, we got together on Discord me, Lucas and Gustavo and started brainstorming ideas for the newly revealed theme of the jam: Locked.
The First Days
We discussed many ideas ranging from metroidvanias with different locked areas to some puzzle games around locks and such. The theme was optional, but it was like the flavor of the jam. Having two fans of slasher movies with me on my team, we quicklly went the horror-game/slasher-movie route, and settled on a game where you need to escape a mansion while being hunted by a slasher (that looks a lot like Jason Voorhees) with the twist of having to unlock doors to access new areas and using the locks to prevent the slasher to get to you.
I really liked this idea and even more the discussion that led to it. I loved seeing the whole team together and excited to do this game.
And so, we started working!
On the first day we already had a prototype of the main mechanics: the slasher chasing you and you locking and unlocking doors. Although it was performed by colored rectangles, it was awesome to see it start to take form.
Blocks running from blocks opening blocks
The first few days I worked on the player and slasher spritesheet trying to use the best practices to good pixel art I learned from many articles and videos. I ended up with these two:
Player
Slasher
It was a blast making these two and working with animations on Aseprite. I think they came out pretty well and I tried to use very different palettes to each of them. Having the player with more warm colors and a a distressed look, while the slasher uses pretty cold colors and using a mask to both convey the feeling of unease and strangeness and give a nod to the classic Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th. The blood-dripping machette was my favorite touch on it.
Also I could feel my skills improving from the first drafts of the player character to the end of the slasher spritesheet. Not only my pixel art skills but also my usage of Aseprite became much more straight-forward and fluid.
After the first week
After the first week of development we had the basic mechanics pretty much finished with the player opening and locking doors, the slasher chasing the player down using A* path-finding and state machines, the spritesheets imported into Unity and we started discussing the level design.
But I can't describe the feeling of viewing the first version of the game using the sprites I created. 😍
So awesome!
So the second week I focused on the mansion itself and fleshingn out the gameplay. I could say many things, but mostly: it took a lot of f*ing time!
We wanted to make a not-so-short game so we needed a big level, and we wanted the player to have ways of escaping and navigating around the slasher so we needed some redundancy and many doors and such. It took me up to the last few hours to finish up the mansion itself and I only managed with the help of the rest of the team doing the furniture and other objects. But, after looking at the end result, I would do it all again!
Finished mansion without the extra furniture the team created
I really loved the end result of the wooden flooring we used for most of the center rooms. It was a pain to make sure it was tiled correctly and I will always have some doubts whether it is actually tiled properly, I loved the end result. The main lesson I took from doing this huge map was that I need to learn perspective and lighting, since some of the rooms and objects look too flat, weird or boring. But after playing the game I think the pressure of the chase makes these details pretty small.
What I learned from all of this
After finishing it all up and submitting at the last few hours of the jam, I think we did a pretty good job. I learned a lot from all of this and I'm sure the team did too. I could say a lot of things about what I learned on this jam, but to make this short I'll keep it to some points:
- Making a game is really fun if you have the right team
- A jam can make things pretty chaotic, but if you keep it light and having fun, it is a wonderful experience
- Again, the right team makes all the difference. Remember to be respectful and that everyone has their own lives beside making the game
- Art takes a lot of time to be done, so keep it simple and don't slack on it (Hindsight is 20/20, right?)
- Never ditch on the fundamentals. Be it art or programming, a good foundation is essential
- Have fun. The goal of a game is to be fun and of a game jam too. So don't take things too seriously and do your best!
You can play the submitted version of the game at itch.io and you can hit me up on twitter, itch.io or github if you want to know more about it, or even just to chat!
Have a good one!
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