Oh yes I did!
I entered the Game Maker’s Toolkit game jam, which took part from the 23rd to the 26th of June. It was a bit of a last-minute decision, since I found out the theme, thought up an idea, and then decided I would create something for it. This one has a slightly simpler premise than the last one, but there was less time. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it!
In Probation Period, you take on the role of someone who has just accepted an offer of employment, from this oddly unnamed corporation. You have a five day probation period, in which you’re expected to complete a certain number of tasks. Fail to complete your tasks and you get fired.
What Went Well?
Well, it’s another game completed and shipped, right? I’ll take that!
Sure, it’s nothing outstanding, concept-wise, but I tried to lean into the satirical nature and emphasise the mundaneness of the tasks. Not sure if I quite hit the mark there, but the challenge does ramp up nicely as you count down the days.
Beyond that, I was pleased to get a better start on level design when compared to my last jam. I think this is partly experience, and partly time – I simply didn’t have time to linger and worry too much about the overall structure of the level. I enjoy placing all of the detailed elements and making the scene feel more “lived-in” (although again, I didn’t really have time to put as much in as I’d like)
Another aspect I particularly enjoyed doing, and think went reasonable well was adding a variety of audio effects. Picking up and placing most items, the audio on interacting with certain objects, etc. makes the level feel a lot more responsive. Putting the kettle or cup down with a satisfying thud makes a world of difference.
And settings – as in, the game has some this time. Nothing enormously granular, but since I started early with the audio mixer, I could split out volume controls better and provide sliders for changing them. That works pretty well overall, so I’m happy with that.
What Went Wrong?
So, I have a couple of niggling things, and then one more ginormous “wrong” that happened, if I can call it that (might be a bit harsh, but you be the judge of that)
Overall, the level is a bit sparse across the board – the level layout, task list, general balancing, feedback mechanisms. I have a bit of all of these in. But because of (you guessed it) time, I couldn’t flesh these out as much as I’d have liked. The result is an okay-at-best experience, but nothing that much extra. I have, I think, 10 or so unique tasks that can be undertaken in there. I’d have liked around double that to give a more varied playthrough, but 10 was the minimum to have it working well.
A quick shortcut that I took which helped was to speed up the level clock, effectively giving the player less time to perform their tasks. As the tasks ramp up, that does feel surprisingly effective, but I didn’t get a whole lot of playtesting in to determine if that’s balanced enough yet. Some aspect may simply be down to luck of the random draw.
Audio balancing is a new area to me. I used a lot of effects audio, which meant I had items of varying volumes. While I did some amount of editing, splitting up the audio tracks and simple fading or speeding up, the game would have benefited from extra time in this area. Many of the effects are challenging to hear over the background music.
And for the final act, the big reveal, call it what you will – ultimately, I don’t think the game was quite as adventurous as it could have been. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased with the end result and it’s reasonably polished, but I didn’t experiment with any new techniques or go out there too much with the concept (I certainly had some “funner” ideas that perhaps wouldn’t have been done in time.) – I think this is ultimately down to the timeframe. Four days isn’t long (and I didn’t really have that much time during the weekend, so realistically much of this was done in two days)
That said, I have just come off the back of Synty’s 12th Birthday Game Jam – which was my first non-tutorial submission (and I count as my first ever ‘proper’ game release) – I could consider it a big win that I put something together in less than half the time, and that is still an element of skill development ultimately.
Summary
Overall, this jam went very well. This game is a little rougher around the edges than the last one, but if nothing else, I proved to myself that it’s still doable when compressing the timeframe. That’s pretty important to me, because I’ll spend a week doing something that needs a day.
I didn’t go into this jam with any specific goals (other than the obvious “make a half-decent short game” I suppose), so it would be unfair to try and retroactively measure myself against any of those.
One thing this was good for, was, without a doubt, reinforcing the learn-by-doing and get some extra progression along my game development journey. I’ll take that any day of the week.
What’s Next?
Back to school! Well, kind of. I’ve been wanting to figure out some of the more advanced math stuff, so I can figure out what a Quaternion actually is (and other things along those lines)
After that, I’d love to spend some time trying to get NPCs into a game. These asset packs come with plenty so I can just focus on making them do interesting things and making scenes feel more alive. One thing I noticed during the last two jams is that the scenes can be a little bland, and I think adding extra characters with their own behaviours will be a pretty good use of my time exploring.