finally got a free weekend to jam, let's do this

perfect time to explore unity 2021 outside of work

Paper Pile Panic, a game where you, the intern, have to go through increasingly absurd papers.

A scoping problem

As is fairly common when you come up with ideas for a game, tons of ideas flow around your head the moment you get inspiration on a theme. Especially when you have multiple team members, and creative ones at that. But then, there's no way you can implement all of them in a single weekend, right?

Jam after Jam, it's clear that being able to determine what constitutes the minimum viable game within all of your ideas and them implementing that helps a lot with getting a fun game out. This doesn't mean forgetting about all of your extra ideas, but you should expect to have to drop a lot of them. That could also includes extra assets - a lot of stuff can go unused in these games.

Sorry Eg-GE, we couldn't get your fish in the shredder.

A different approach

After brainstorming, we wanted to implement both a days system, and an endless mode - oddly similar to our first ideas on F.U.D, our LD52 game.

Compared to F.U.D, we decided to approach the problem differently, and decided to implement the days system first. Going for the days first means designing and implementing all the related systems that can load different specific game configuration at runtime. Then, implementing an endless mode is only a little harder than implementing another day: after all, an endless mode is just a special case of a day! For Paper Pile Panic, we opted to procedurally make the final day harder and harder as part of the endless mode, to give a challenge while still allowing a break every minute or so.

In F.U.D, we implemented the endless system first - this made it hard to rework the system to implement a day system within the time limits of the Jam, forcing our focus on other aspects of the game (like controls and balancing.

An extra day

The amount of time you can allocate to the Jam can be the difference between a rushed game and a polished game. We only spent two days on F.U.D, whereas we used the full three days on Paper Pile Panic. It doesn't feel like much at first, but knowing that we had three days, it didn't feel bad to take it slow on some things to design things better.

Our tasks and sorting bins are fairly extensible, with classes that you can easily inherit from to create new variants that still properly tie in with the rest of the system without repeating yourself. We only had one task implemented in the first two days, but as the system was designed to be easily extensible, four extra tasks only took an hour or two on Monday, adding much needed variety for the multi-day system we opted to implement.

was this fun?

yes

Wanted to be there for LD55, couldn't because I got massively sick precisely on that weekend. Sucks. BUT I'M BACK. And I'll take this opportunity to get back in the groove for Godot and game jamming. Three jams so far, all have been a ton of fun and I'm not going to stop there :sparkles:

thoroughly cooked at the end of the day.

Settled on a top-down shooter/brawler concept where you collect skills and abilities over the course of a run. Not too confident with how fitting to the theme it is, but it's a nice idea to learn even more about Godot so that's a win for me

have a Gun

Skillector

Collect coins, buy skills, collect more coins (the enemies have them) (they don't stop coming) (help me)

Play and rate Skillector here

the visual difference between one day and the next can be pretty impressive with the work we put into it

saturday night: barely even had a gun

sunday night: the game is complete and all that was left was polishing, balancing, and maybe some extra content

and there was some extra content added before monday night. very proud of what we've done!

Play and rate Skillector here