Dot Jump - Postmortem (Brackeys Game Jam 2022.1)

It's Jam Time!  🙌 😁 🙌

I have participated in multiple game jams in hopes of finishing a game from start to finish. But I never could. This time was different though. I could feel it :) I knew I could complete the game.

Why?

Because Brackeys Game Jams are a week-long!!

I can finish a game in a week. Right?

The Theme

Jam themes almost always drive me crazy. All my unfinished Jam games started as "simple" ideas, but I always felt they were not sticking to the theme enough. 

Enter SCOPE CREEP. But this time I had a week. I can do this! 😀

The theme for Brackeys Game Jam 2022.1 was It is not real.

Yikes!!

I now had a week to make a game from start and finish it.

Here's how it went.

Day 1

I was super excited for the Game Jam. It was supposed to start on Feb 20th, 2022 at 4:30 PM (IST). I couldn't wait. 

Once the theme was announced to be "This is not real". All my excitement went down the drain.

Will I have to make a story-based game? 

Do I even have the skills to do it? 

What mechanics to implement?

I had no answers to any of these questions. And it was Sunday - a week away from the deadline. I had time.

Day 2

Disaster!!! 

My dog got scared of a plant (yes, a plant) and jumped from the couch. 

Result - Broken Leg!! It was bad. Real bad. The bones looked like splintered woods in the x-rays. 

The day is gone worrying about her pup! Poor baby.

Day 3

The vet put a cast for the front leg and told us to wait a couple of days. Once we were back home I decided to spend some time on the game. 

But no. There was some urgent office work to be done.

Another day has gone. 😔

Day 4 

Nothing today either. More office work! And the doggy needs some attention.

Day 5 

More office work! Doggy needs more attention.

Day 6

Our dog had to get surgery 😥

We took the dog to the vet and the x-rays showed the bones hadn't set properly. Moreover, the bones had started to heal in the wrong position.

The vet suggested we do the surgery to prevent long-term damage.

Another day has gone.

Day 7 

It's Saturday and I am free from office work, and so is my wife. She can take care of our pup for some time.

30 hours remaining for submission.

Finally, I can start working on a game.

Wait!! Who's gonna do the house chores?? Play with our dog?? Eat lunch?? Afternoon nap??

Ok, all done.

20 hours remaining for submission. 

I told my wife I am going to work on the game. She agreed, actually encouraged me to do so. Noice :)

So I started...

All these days I was kinda working on my game - working in my head. I knew my game will be a jumping game with disappearing platforms. I just didn't know how it will fit with the theme.

But I had to start somewhere. So I started with planning. 

I knew my game had to be simple. So keeping that in mind, I laid out my tasks. I completed almost all of them. In a way.

So the first thing to do was the jump.

Simple right?

No!!! Problems instantly.

My player was not jumping every time I pressed Space. What the hell!!

The fix was simple. Just change the velocity in Update instead of Fixed Update. But my dumb brain only came up with that after 2 hours. 

17 hours remaining for submission. 

One-way platforms were not easy to make. Just add a platform effector. Done!

Disappearing One-way platforms were not easy to make. 

There was a crazy issue. If you jump from one DIA (Disappearing One-way Platform) to another, the first one disappeared. No problem. But so did the second one. All the DIAs were sharing the same "Disappear" script. So every time the player exited the collision the platforms disappeared. 

The fix was again simple.

Add a new variable to the player called isJumping (bool). When the player jumps, isJumping is true and the platform disappears. If isJumping is false platform stays. On the Disappear script for the platform, I checked when the player collided with the platform and set isJumping to false.

15 hours remaining for submission.

Moving Platforms!!! Oof!! Let's just say this took almost 4 hours to implement and move on. Yes? Thanks.

Day 8

6 hours remain for submission.

Where did the rest of the time go? Eating and sleeping of course.

At this point, I had all the mechanics done. Yayyy!!

Now it was time to make levels. But that's not an easy task. This was uncharted territory for me. I had never gotten this far. So I made two levels. That's it 😔 

And...lunchtime.

3 hours remain for submission.

To make the game look complete, I added a Main Menu and a Game over screen. I was using a circle sprite for my player and a square sprite for the platforms. In the name of art, I only had time to change the colors for the sprites following a color palette. For the background, I picked a light color and changed the color of the Camera background. All this took some time since this was the first time I was doing all this.

1 hour remaining for submission.

In another first, I wanted to build the game for WebGL. I hadn't even installed the modules. More time wasted!!

I got my first build and uploaded it to itch. I found minor issues and fixed them quite easily.

30 minutes remaining for submission.

The game looked quite boring. So in a last-ditch effort to add some excitement, I decided to add a "trail" to the player. Again, first time doing so. But this was easy. I am actually proud of it.

10 minutes remaining for submission.

So one final build and I am done. But, disaster!!! Unity crashed while building the game! AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!

I didn't know if the game even survived the crash. This was probably the end.

So one last time I started Unity.... and to my relief, the game still existed and even more importantly, still worked.

I  tried building the game and it was successful.

With 3 minutes to go for the submission deadline, I uploaded the game. I UPLOADED A GAME!!! Wooooohoooo!!!

I know it's been a long read, so I'll just say this - keep the scope down!

Play Dot Jump here.