5 min read
I think I managed to bump my nerd status up a level or two over the last weekend. You may wonder why that is, well, it's because I spent the whole thing developing a video game! In light of Mark Brown's Game Maker's Toolkit Game Annual Game Jam, I decided to put a team together and participate this year! This is a jam that I've been wanting to take part in since it started, but never quite got around to until...well...gestures to everything around us...all this. And so, together with my friends Claire and Mugi, I set out to make a contribution.
The theme of this year's jam was "Out of Control", quite fitting for the current state of things, and we immediately started thinking up ideas that fit the theme and sounded fun. Our ideas ranged from a game about a snowball furiously pelting down an alpine mountain that you had to slow down somehow, to making something similarly bizarre where you could use the Ctrl key to affect parts of the game, but it would have had only a limited amount of times you could use it, leading to you eventually running - Out of Ctrl .
In the end, we all fell in love with the idea of a quirky platformer where the player runs around collecting bananas to maintain their rapidly dropping potassium levels, lest they let that level drop too low and end up flying into an uncontrollable rage brought on by too little bananas in their system. This mode was dubbed "Going Bananas", but we mostly referred to it as "Berserk Mode" during development.
And so, after thinking of ideas through Friday night and deciding on Unity as our tool of choice, we got started on the game on Saturday morning. I got to work on the basics, using a combination of C# scripts and Unitys' inbuilt functions to give the player the basic abilities of movement that are usually associated with a 2D Platformer, I.E moving left and right and jumping, while my teammates set up the particulars of the Going Bananas mode, making it so the player had to fight against random inputs to regain control of themselves by grabbing a nearby banana.
Once the basics were set up, we thought about how the player would progress in the game. Given the time constraint, we decided on a scoring system across a single screen. The player would go for as long as they possibly could and the goal would always be to beat your previous/highest score, making the game replayable and challenging in its own right without getting overly complicated.
Meanwhile, as the game formed into something that we all slowly began to find mildly addicting (which is how you know it's working!), we got to work on the visual aspects. None of us were much of artists so given the time we had, we went down the route of using the most suitable and most amusing pre-existing art we could find within a Creative Commons license. As the game went from grey box with programmer art I had whipped up in photoshop the night before to something resembling a bright and colourful environment, we all got excited as one does when they see a project coming alive.
Once the clock rolled into the next day, we decided to take a break and reconvene in the morning.
On Sunday morning, we continued at the good pace we had been going at. Mugi had straightened out the way the berserk mode worked and added that much needed flair of level design that was required to make the game fun, almost too fun in fact, to the point where we ended up competing with each other to get the highest score for about a half hour until we decided it was time to get back to actually working on the thing!
After adding some whimsicality, a start screen, a try again button (that was thoroughly tested), we had something resembling a final product. Mugi continued at their break neck pace and produced two new levels for us to play with, as Claire and I added the little bells and whistles we permitted ourselves to add only when the core gameplay loop had been established. I got to work adding a trampoline leaf that catapulted the player back to the top part of the stage to make it easier for them to get around while the titular bananas spawned randomly across the level, meanwhile, Claire added music and sound effects to the mix to give our game that last little something that it needed.
And so it was that at around 7:35pm, 20 minutes before the deadling on Sunday, after adding an easy mode 20 minutes before that thanks to the fast work of Claire and Mugi, we submitted our game with a great feeling of accomplishment in our hearts, and a great need to sleep in our bodies.
If you happen to be running a Windows machine, the game is available now to play (and rate!) on itch.io here.
Long story short, I think I have a hankering for a hackathon now