So, it’s once again been a while since my last blog post, but I guess with the holidays (and having to get the grades in for the classes I’m teaching), I sort of have a good excuse? Anyway, though, one of the things I said in my last post that I was going to do was to participate in a game jam. And, well, I just did. Specifically, I made an entry for Discord Jam #5, running from January 1 to January 3.
(One of the other things I said I was going to do was finish one of the simple LEGO Microgames I had conceived, but that… eh, I’ve had some second thoughts about that. Maybe I’ll do that at some point, but I have too much on my plate as it is and limited time, so I think that’s going to go on the back burner for a while.)
And how did it go? Well… it could have gone better, but it could have gone worse. The biggest problem is that for some reason I had kind of a mental block and just couldn’t think of what kind of game I wanted to make. The theme for the jam turned out to be “Mutation”, which you’d think would lend itself to all sorts of ideas, but I just couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe I was still a little out of it because a few days before I’d just stayed up all night finishing a 24-hour comic. (As for why I was doing that, it’s kind of a long story that’s not related to this blog, so… never mind.) But for whatever reason I just wasn’t able to settle on an idea I liked till Saturday afternoon, meaning that I only had twenty-four hours, rather than forty-eight, to create the game.
But I did finally come up with an idea, involving grabbing mutant mangos from a conveyor belt (hey, I didn’t say it was a great idea), and then I… well, I was going to say I spent more time than I probably should have on mapping out the game environment and building it in Blender, but honestly I’m not sure that’s true; I did spend a lot of time on that, but I guess it was kind of necessary. (I first started mapping out the environment in Blender, but there were so many overlapping layers of conveyor belts that it turned out to be more practical to map it out in Adobe Illustrator so I could turn layers on and off.
And then it was time to build the environment in Blender, and that was mostly fairly straightforward, except… ye gads. Those stairs. Those accursed stairs. There has to be an easier way to do the stairs. Actually, I might have been able to write a python script to help with the stairs, but I don’t have all that much experience writing python scripts for blender (I’ve done it before, but I’m by no means an expert), and I wasn’t sure it might take me longer to write the script and get it working than it would to just create the stairs manually, and time was already short enough that I didn’t want to risk losing more time—though it might be worth writing some scripts to take care of tasks like this in case they come up in the future. Anyway, I got it done, of course, but creating those stairs was the most tedious part of the project.
What remained then, of course, was actually coding the game. Which I did. I used some placeholders; the mangos started out as just spheres, the mutant mangos as cubes, the player as a featureless pink capsule, and the conveyor belts as dark gray rectangles. And, well, the conveyor belts stayed dark gray rectangles, but after getting the basic gameplay working I actually had enough time to make a mango model, as well as make two different kinds of mutant mangos (I would have made more if I’d had time). And while the player stayed a capsule, I had just enough time before the deadline to at least give the capsule a texture so it didn’t look quite so boring, as well as adding music and sound effects. (Well, a sound effect. And very repetitive music only nine measures long, but again, time was limited.) And I had a working game.
Well, mostly. I realized just after it was submitted that there was a serious bug; I’d forgotten to tag one of the two types of mutant mangos, so it couldn’t be picked up. Fortunately, the discord jam allows bugfixes after the deadline, so I uploaded a fixed version as soon as I realized the issue, but I’ll have to be more careful for the next game jam I participate in. (Actually, I just realized that I also didn’t set the boolean variable that made this mutant mango take away a life if it reached the end of the track… oops. Guess I’ll make another quick bugfix update.)
There is, of course, a lot that I’d add or change if I had more time. And actually, I think the basic concept of the game is interesting enough I may spend some time in the future expanding it to a full game. (Eventually… again, this isn’t a priority.) But for now, it feels kind of good to actually have participated in a game jam. This won’t be the last one, of course. I’m thinking of participating in the next Mini Jam, which starts on Thursday…
And of course, I plan to keep going through more tutorials on Unity Learn, too, though I haven’t had time for that lately. And actually, I recently found out that there are now free courses for learning Unreal Engine as well, and I’m probably going to give those a try—I like Unity, but there’s no harm in expanding my knowledge base.
Still, in all honesty I’m probably not going to get to any of that in the next few days, so probably my next post here will be about the Mini Jam. Still… at least I feel like I’m doing something, I guess.
Oh, whoops, I almost forgot; here’s a link to the game: https://miskin.itch.io/mutant-mango-mayhem-v01
