June Game Jam

Our June Game Jam can be played here. I wouldn't though.

No one is big on putting their failures on their portfolios and there are good reasons for that. Main one being it makes you look bad. But in my case, as a young creative, I think it's important to reflect on these things and show growth.

The funny thing is made my team do this Game Jam knowing there was a high chance for failure. Breakneck Butterfly had the perfect conditions to be made, we had a sizeable project window, the starting team was just two people, we already liked the genre and knew what we wanted to make, and the game didn't require too many working parts. It was basically lightning in a bottle.

I knew going into the next project thinking we were game developing savants was going to send us to an early grave. So as a stop gap I made us do a 10-day game jam to catch any cracks in our team and design process. And cracks there were!

We lost days because my programmer and I couldn't agree on how we wanted to design the game. Was it a stealth game? A platformer? Would the enemy chase you the whole time? Only when they see you? Would levels be the size of one screen or span through multiple? Etcetera etcetera.

And since we spent too long trying to design something, we didn't give enough time for the art, which was handled by me and another team member.

The lack of focus killed the game and in the end all we had to show for it was basically a tech demo.

The in-depth report/post-mortem on this can be found here.

These growing pains will be appreciated in due time.