My first Game Jam Experience - Open Jam
If you don't know what a game jam is then I will tell you. A game jam is basically a competition where a bunch of people group up and make a game within the given time frame. For my first game jam, I entered into Open Jam. Open Jam was a 72-hour game jam that took place in October of last year. The reason behind the name Open Jam was because it was open source which means anyone can see your code or change your game. Let me tell you about my game and my experience throughout.
I created a team with me and one of my friends. We started out with an idea to make a sandbox. We thought that it would be a little hard to pull that off in 72-hours so we changed it into a survival type of game. The objective was to gather resources and build a base to fend off hordes of zombies. The hardest part of creating this was getting the Zombie AI to work properly. Most of that my friend did. Another challenge was getting correct artwork. I'm no pixel artist but I'm slowly getting better. With this game, I made almost all of the art and it was definitely hard. We titled our game Luna Interficere. Which is along the lines of "kill the moon."
Here are some pictures of the game.
Towards the top left of the screen, there are all of the different guns you can use. The first one is for destroying, then building, a shotgun, an assault rifle, and finally the sniper. On the bottom left of the screen you can see your players health, resources, days survived, and the number of zombies left in the world.
One more picture of the game at night.
This game jam proved to be very difficult for me and my friend. It consisted of, for me at least, a lack of sleep and 1 all-nighter. We definetlely learned a lot from this game jam and had a lot of fun. After we were done with the game we submitted it and waited for the rating process. I played a lot of other peoples games and there were some really cool ones. The most notable one for me was Dunjo's quest. Where you would walk around solving puzzles in a retro dungeon scroller. I liked this one because of the graphics. After all the games where rated Luna Interficere placed in 18th place. I thought we would have done better but we still did well considering it was our first game jam. All in all, I'm very happy I got to participate in this fun game jam.
If you want to play our game you can visit the link here:
https://necavare.itch.io/luna-interficere
If you want to check out the other Open Jam entries you can check those out here:
https://itch.io/jam/open-jam-1/results
Heres one last gif of our game.
