Old projects – Old Save (2015 Global Game Jam)

This is the second game I worked on for a Global Game Jam, and it’s more of a cautionary tale than my 2014 entry.

With ‘What do we do now?’ as the jam’s main theme, the team I was part of decided to go with the concept of getting a game with somebody else’s save data on it, which was actually a pretty common occurence back when save data was still backed up in game cartridges, and you’d often end up with somebody else’s saves when botting up games you had rented or borrowed from friends.

Going off of that concept, the game was meant to start in the fictional game’s final battle, with players getting a randomized set of skills they could use against the boss, with icons being generic so players would have to experiment with skills in order to learn what each of them did, all while dodging the boss’s attacks.

While the concept was indeed pretty interesting, we ended up trying to bite more than we could chew, and barely got to fit a couple spell effects into the game before the deadline as a result, making for a pretty awful final product, and a valuable lesson on the importance of planning for a feasible scope when developing games (especially during short jams).

On the programming side, this game was really crazy for me when I noticed a particularily elusive bug that caused players to not take damage from the boss’s attacks if they stood completely still, which was related with their rigidbody timing out and going to sleep due to inactivity, if I remember correctly.

The project also was my first foray into animations used for attacks, which I’d later work into the basics of combat systems I use today, but that’s a story for another time.