Our group is composed of 3 students at a small liberal arts college.  Our professor assigned our class to make a game for Ludum Dare 32 for the final project of the semester.  This was our first Ludum Dare and the very first game jam that we participated in.  Needless to say, this was quite the experience

 

The fork can pierce objects to pull them to the character, the knife can cut objects, and the spoon can push the objects away. We created puzzles around these tools. Thus, in the end, the genre we picked is 2D puzzle and platformer.

 

What was the genre, objective, and theme you chose for your game?

 

Due to the limited time, we decided to go with a 2D platformer since that reduces the need for making new assets.  We decided our player would be a chef, who uses silverware as his weapon arsenal – a fork, a knife, and a spoon.  We wanted something more than a simple 2D platformer, so we decided the genre for our game is to be a 2D puzzle platformer.

 

What were your initial goals?

 

• Initially, we wanted all three weapons to have separate uses in solving puzzles.  Fork – pull, spoon – push block, knife – cut/throw.
• We had designed 3 levels with unique puzzles designed to teach the players how to use the tools available to them.  Each level would teach them about a new tool.
• On top of puzzles for each level, we had intended to add bosses at the ends of the levels that would encourage players use the tools they learned about from the level to succeed.  The final boss would force players to use all the tools.
• The game was meant to have tutorial GUIs for each tool, AI Steering Behaviors for bosses, Health for the players and enemies, etc.

 

Which of these goals were you able to meet?

 

The game turned out to be very incomplete, as would be obvious to anyone playing.  Our goals were very ambitious for our short timeframe and we neglected simple aspects, such as a starting screen and victory screen.  As Chef Adventure is now, it starts a player in the game with no clear motivation or direction.

 

Using Unity, we had been able to incorporate reasonable physics to our player and the boxes that the player could push.  However, we had to settle on a single level and single tool (the spoon) to accomplish something before the jam was over.

 

What asset tools did you end up using?

 

Unity was an excellent engine to use, and many things that come standard were very helpful, such as the Animator, Collision, etc.

 

Sithjester’s RPG Maker XP resources. This repository of spritesheets was very helpful and the creator only asked to be credited for his work.  Seeing as our player character comes directly from was of his spritesheets, we found this very useful.

 

We also used Auto Tile Gen to make our ground look like a nice addition to a 2D platformer

 

Adobe photoshop was vigorously used in making sprites look have a similar feel to each other.

 

How do you plan to improve in the game over the next two weeks?

 

• Interactive GUI, players need information to play a game for motivation and how to actually play
• Multiple levels, with bosses and goals.  We planned very nice mechanics and puzzles to play on each level but never got around to making them part of the game.
• Sound.  This game doesn’t have any sound and that can easily be fixed using simple, free, tools from around the web.
• Picking up ingredients.  The objective of the game was supposed to be “collect ingredients from bosses to make the ultimate meal.”

Overall, we learned a lot about preparation for a game jam.  A lot of problems could have been avoided if we had made some assets pre-made in Unity before we started.