devtober 2019

First time participating #devtober !

Intro

I bumped into the jam when skimming through the game jams here on itch.io. The idea seemed good, as I'm eager to learn about game development, so why not try to do something each day! I knew my time would be limited, since was also recording guitars for my band's first album and later in the month I'd start a new hobby.

My initial idea for #devtober was to read, listen, mingle, blabber and learn about gamedev any way possible. And report about the findings in Twitter. I also had plans to participate to Retro Game Jame (RGJ) here in Helsinki.

Retro Game Jam Hel

RGJ was an interesting jam, as the focus was retro hardware. Thus, I prepared to do something for the NES by reading https://nesdoug.com/ tutorials. (A nice info package about how NES works!) So, learnt quite a bit about NES. Which was nice.

In RGJ our team decided to make a game for Nintendo DS. The game concept was to BLAST HAMSTERS in the YEAR 3000 which is an awesome concept! The name of the game was HAMSTER BLASTER 3000!  The game itself was somekind of a platformer shooter. The hero runs and jumps and shoots evil hamsters, who shoot back and bounce annoyingly. We got the game running on NDS, which was coooool! I made the theme music and sound effects. And did some simple map design.

Check out:
https://soundcloud.com/obscurage/hamster-blaster-3000-main
https://poolo.itch.io/hamster-blaster-3000

HAMSTER BLASTER 3000 CONTINUES

After the jam, I wanted to work some more with the game, as it wasn't finished. Like so many game jam games. So I installed Linux on my laptop and then installed the development environment. I managed to do some small tweaks, but wasn't really getting anywhere. 

So finally, on day 19, I figured that if I'd change to Unity, I might do something myself. And so, I started to build the game from scratch. The art that was made during the jam helped immensely, and made it possible to actually work with the game itself.

On the first Unity-day, I got running and its animation in addition to platforms working, and started with background parallax. Before the next possible development day, I read about Unity and version control. On the next development day I added jumping, shooting and SFX, and probably version control as well. On the third day, I added enemies that could be blasted.

Podcasts

I listened podcasts about gamification and gamedev. 

On gamedev side I noticed that https://www.gamedev.tv/ have a podcast, which consist of community discussions. Good themes they talk about, yes. 

I also noticed that https://www.gamedevloadout.com/ was back with new episodes! Loads of good stuff in the interviews!

Afterthoughts

It seems that the actual development time was limited, but that was known before the jam started.

All in all, I think that this theme for the month gave some focus and structure. Perhaps next time I can allocate more time and thought for actual development work. Thank you for organizing this jam, Ellian!

I think that I will continue with HAMSTER BLASTER 3000, as the game has potential, and it looks and sounds awesome. ;) 

No promises, though. Need to record some heavy metal, too.

https://www.instagram.com/medicatedband/