Tescale and my experience with my first game jam.

Hey, not sure who would be reading this, but i thought I would write about my experience with the GMTK 2024 game jam which was my first game jam.

I've always wanted to participate in one of these even back when I just got into programming 2 years ago. But it just wasn't the right time and life stuff happens ya'know?  Anyway I finally had the time(I though anyway) and motivation to try and participate in this years jam. So here is how it went.

When I first heard about the theme Build to Scale i bounced around a few ideas for a few minutes but i had gotten the core concept of a platformer where Tetris like blocks fall down and you having to ascend said blocks pretty quickly. I brained stormed by the drawing the concepts down first.

With that i started working on it. The first day went pretty okay, and I thought I would be able to finish it by the end of the weekend, I am currently an undergrad in university so my planned was to finish the base game by Sunday night and add any polishing touches when I had the time over the next 2 days. That didn't happened.

On the second day I was programming the wall jump and was stuck on it for half of the day. It just didn't look right and I was fidgeting around with it to try and get it right. I've realized that I have very little experience working with the physics system in unity. My past two games and the one I am currently working on didn't really use any physics or rigid body stuff. In the end I had to just replace my script with one from a youtube tutorial on it.

By the start of Monday it become apparent to me that everything I had planned for the Game was not going to get done by Tuesday. Originally it was going to be an endless game where the goal was to get as high as possible. I had no idea how to do that and was afraid it would complicate more things and I still didn't have any art ready for it yet. So i taught about just simplifying it down to reaching a certain height and the score would just be your time. I taught about incorporating at least 3 levels with different blocks types like a block that would slow you down and one that would be slippery and make it hard to climb. I would have gotten it done I think, but then I stuck for the second half of Monday with a feature of the game.

If you did play Tescale you probably noticed the large box next to the buttons. It was suppose to be a screen that displayed the current block that would be falling. But it just was not working, I followed the tutorials to a tea and even messed with the camera settings and render engine but nothing was working.

When i woke up on Tuesday I knew i would only have the afternoon to work on it. So i had to scale it down to just one level and abandon the screen feature entirely. Lucky the last few hours were relatively pleasant and I got it done.

It isn't the game I imaged it being in the start most certainly if someone with more experience made this game it would be done much quicker and be more polished. I should clarify that I never worked 24/7 on it. Even during the weekend it was around 8-9sh hours at most a day. For what it is I am happy that it turned out to be at least a functioning video game.

I think one thing i can take away from this is that I probably should be more open to asking for help from the community. I never found a solution to my screen problem  in time but had I just asked in the discord server, somebody could've helped me with the issue. Maybe I'll try working with other people for next years jam which I can't wait to take part in it again!

Thank you for reading about my experience. If you have any advise to give me please do so! I have a lot to learn.