Things I learned from my first solo game jam
A lot of this writing is for my own reflection, but I hope this also helps other beginner solo devs!
So I've been trying to get into making games for a long time now. I recently finished CS50 to get a good foundation for understanding code, and I was planning to to the game development course Harvard offers as well but I'm finding that I'm just hungry to start making as much as I can as fast as possible! It took me a while to finally force myself to do a jam for whatever reason, but having the constraints of something with a time limit was a great motivator.
My background is in art and design, but I think I've always wanted to be a game maker. When I was young I really just figured games were magic, not something I could ever make, so you can imagine how excited I am to be making games now, rudimentary as they are!
I was mostly able to work on this while I've been on break at my day job, and that said, I'm pretty pleased with what I was able to accomplish! I want to try to make a new game every week, or at least keep up with the Mini Jams which occur every 2 weeks.
This is as far as I can see taking this game for now, I've added a few features since the Mini Jam 159 ended:
- Random encounters with waves, sharks.
- Clouds that spawn in random numbers, positions.
- 2 Islands, one where you can only rest and restore stamina(the bar on the bottom of the screen) and one which activates the win state.
- A secret compass item that shows a coordinate to help you better know where you have and haven't explored
- A win state.
Since the Jam, I asked my brother, a musician, to make some music for it, which is now in the game! It was fun to bounce ideas and see how our different perspectives can effect the games feel.
New things I learned to do in Game Maker Studio:
- Do things with RNG (clouds, sharks, waves)
- Make (in theory) an unlimited amount of space to explore,
- create the illusion of new spaces
- Create Items that change gameplay
- Use particle systems
- create status indicators
- got more used to using alarms
- add music with an intro and then set it to loop after
I plan to make little posts like this after i've finished a game on a respective week to leave a journal of my progress and process, so stay tuned and share your thoughts if you like.
Thanks for your interest in this post!
– zo-ku (she/they)
Files
Get lost at sea
lost at sea
you're lost in the middle of the ocean, odds of survival seem as small as they could get.
More posts
- Mini Jam 159 - Lost At SeaMay 30, 2024
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