During the period between February 3-5th, I participated in my first Game Jam (kindly hosted by the people at Farset Labs). It was a great experience,
despite being out of my comfort zone and using software I had previously no experience with. I participated with both a friend of mine and someone that
we met upon showing up at the venue, and together we came up with a concept that would fit this years theme of "roots".
Rather than going with a game designed around a "tree" or "nature" theme, we went with the concept of a "root" user downloading viruses onto their computer
and having to fix it before time runs out. Whilst the initial plan was to make an isometric pixel game (similar to that of Earthbound etc.), the voxel idea
proposed by our teammate did work out better in the long run. For the project, we decided to go with Unity, as it seemed to be the most user-friendly to learn from
scratch. There were alot of interesting projects showcased that used a wide range of engines, especially with the relatively-new Godot (such as
Rewildr).
Looking back, the biggest hurdle that we had to overcome was version control, as for something like a Unity project, a simple GitHub repo wasn't going to
cut it. Thankfully, we managed to solve this problem with the use of PlasticSCM, which, if you're looking for any sort of version control for videogame projects,
is a lifesaver. I would say this is what ate most of our time, and if we had this set up much earlier, mechanics such as more "tasks" to do or more fleshed out
level design would've came to fruition.
If you're interested, you can find our game here or through my projects page. Many thanks to
both Andrew and Edgard for their contributions and hard work during this chaotic weekend.
