"Bear Bones" Game Jam Post-Mortem
- dalynoliver
- Oct 29, 2024
- 3 min read
I participated in Gamecraft’s October Game Jam, “Bare Bones,” as my first-ever jam.
We decided to twist the topic of “Bare Bones” into “Bear Bones.” Our brainstorming process began with the idea of the player character being a skeleton bear. From there, we set the goal to be to eat spooky fish, which led us to use the Spongebob episode Rock Bottom as an inspiration for our setting.
Overall, this jam went really smoothly. I enjoyed being more hands-on with the game, particularly the opportunity to dive into programming and 3D art.
What went well
Scope: This was only a 2-day game jam, and none of us were able to devote our entire weekend to the project. Scope became a major consideration in our brainstorming phase, especially because we set out to make a 3D game. It was a good decision to shoot for an action-arcade genre, with only one type of enemy. This limited the amount of 3D assets we needed to make.
Difficulty Ramping: I decided to design the game with a major difficulty spike about one minute in. People would likely only give this game a few minutes of their time, so I wanted them to experience the game’s range of difficulty as quickly as possible. This would familiarize them with the game and hopefully get them motivated to give it another go.
Communication: My team was very good at communication. We had a Discord channel always pulled up. We kept everyone up to date on what we were doing, and what we were planning on doing next.
Task Management: During the initial brainstorming session we created a Jira board. We were able to outline tasks for the entire jam from the very beginning. Having this board made it much easier to know what to do next, which made us work so much faster.
Art: We set ourselves apart by having our game use 3D assets. While it was more time-consuming than 2D, it was worth it to have such a distinct visual style. We played to our team’s strengths by incorporating 3D models, shaders, and VFX. I'm particularly proud of my "Diver" character, which I made every aspect of.
What Could Have Been Better
Playtesting: I decided to take on many roles during this jam, so I think I let my game design role slip. I didn’t play the game enough, which led to some glaring issues. What particularly bugs me is the way the game’s enemies would group together, which makes them much easier to deal with. I caught this issue too late in development to do anything about it. For future jams, playtesting should be more of a priority.
Level Design: While we created some great environmental assets for our level, we didn’t prioritize level design enough. The final level is pretty flat, with very few obstacles. Having a level block out earlier in development would have helped to make the game more interesting.
Source Control: We used a GitHub repository for this project. For the majority of the project, it went smoothly. However, at the last minute, we had some issues, which led to some very stressful moments as we were running up against the deadline. In the future, it would be a good idea to make sure everyone understands GitHub before the jam starts. I also want to educate myself more on GitHub, specifically on how to resolve merge conflicts.
Takeaways
We did a great job at playing into our strengths, organizing, and communicating. There were a few areas that should have been given more priority, such as level design and playtesting.
Overall, I am quite satisfied with our game. While this jam was a lot of work, it was immensely rewarding to create a solid experience in such a short amount of time.
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