Hectic Jam August 2015

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love me a game jam! This time I was leading a group of 5, and we made a stealth game called Broken Dolls, which can be played here.

This was the first time I've worked with another coder (Peter) that ended with a finished game, and also the first time I've worked with another coder when I was in charge.  The fact that it all worked out was amazing, considering we were using usb drives to update each other on our code rather than git or tortoiseSVN. We kept it simple, and distributed the work like this: "One of us should do the bad guys, and the other should do everything else." which was a pretty even split of the work, considering there were four types of bad guy with different animations, pathfinding, patrolling, field of vision and state machines, yadda yadda yadda. Seeing as we stuck to our own work, there was very little overlap, so there were almost no conflicts. When there was one (where the enemies grab the player), Peter solved it like it like a knife through hot butter. 

My old enemy, sleep, reared its ugly head again. I've been trying to fix my sleep schedule for months now, but sleeping tablets aren't working and I lack the discipline to force myself to wake up at a reasonable hour, so for the last half of the jam, I was awake when my team was asleep, and vice versa. But we pulled it off! 

As I mentioned in another post, I was inspired by Ed Sheldon to make a time lapse video of the development of this game. I found a great little program online called Chronolapse, and used it to make this:

This jam ended a bit differently to the other two that I've attended. At the last two, after the games were submitted, the people went around the building and played each others games, saw what else had been made alongside themselves. I really like that part, getting to admire and compare the amount of creativity and work that happens in such a small space and time. But this time, for whatever reason, there was none of that. This time, everyone just packed up and left. Of course we're always tired after a Jam, but this time we just had our priorities elsewhere (like bed). I wonder why?

Either way, this was my 6th Jam, 7th if you count the online Instanity jam, and I'm still shooting for 100 before I die!