Hey boys and girls! Let me tell you a little bit about our experience in making this little jam entry called “Dagobert”.
The Team:
The team working in this jam consists of two nerds from Brazil (huehue and all): Diel Mormac, the coding and music nerd, and Ricardo “Snippety” Gaede, art nerd.
This is our second attempt at a LD jam, and the first time we managed to submit a game.
The Tools:
The game was made in Game Maker Studio Pro.
Sprites were made in Paint (listen mate… it gets the job done. Ok? Stop judging me… geez…) and other visual assets were made in Photoshop.
The music was done in Finale and sound effects were made in bfxr.net.
The What Went Right:
– Last time we participated in a LD jam we got burned, hard. We worked in our entry until the very last minute, but alas, we couldn’t submit something that could be called a game. It stung pretty bad, but we learned from it. And that experience prepared us for this new attempt.
– We chose the tools that we were comfortable with. Our goal in this jam was to finish a game that met some basic personal standards. And for that we decided to go the safe route with our tools. But I’d like add that sometimes using a jam as an excuse to get to know new tools can be really productive too. Just keep in mind what are you trying to achieve from the jam experience.
– We prepared for multiple themes, and even though none of the ideas we came up with ended up being used, this exercise sparked very useful discussions about creating an achievable scope for the project.
The What The Hell Were We Thinking
– It turns out using the final 30 minutes to create the bulk of the level design for your puzzle platformer is a bad idea! I mean… how was I supposed to know that? When we settled on the game’s core mechanics there was one thing we should have taken into account: some mechanics naturally require more intricate level designs to work properly. Not sparing enough time for this critical task was a pretty big oversight.
– We didn’t do any testing with people outside the team, and because of that we didn’t realize that we were missing a key feature: a charge bar indicating the strength of your shots. Sounds obvious (and I think the comment section under our entry agrees), but the truth is… uhmm… we’re dumb. We’re just dumb. To be fair we planned on making a dotted aim so you could tell where your shots would land, but we thought of it as an “extra” (meaning “things we won’t have time to make”), and we didn’t realize a simple charge bar would come a long way sorting this issue.
Well, that’s all I could think of now…
In the end we had a lot of fun, and we’re currently planning on finishing this baby.
In case you’re interested you can play Dagobert HERE.
That’s it, bye!
