First Game Jam: How it went

This project took me about 5 days to complete working solo in my limited free time between working full time and raising a 2 year old. It's a janky, fiddly mess riddled with game breaking bugs, but it's got a certain charm to it that makes me proud. It was, after all, the first full game I've ever released.

When I began working on the game jam I was making a very different game: a first person dungeon crawler filled with twisted deer monsters that would freeze up when you shine a light on them, but hunt you down when you turn away. It was a fun idea, and up to this point I had only worked on first person games so it made sense. I understood first person mechanics and felt comfortable.

But one day after polishing up some weird animations for the deer creatures I realized that this game felt surprisingly boring and uninspired. I felt no desire to finish it. 

Then I had the idea for Carry The Light. A game about holding a torch in the dark. A game where when you die, another person picks up the torch and keeps going. It felt fun and simple and achievable. I went on UE and threw together a real rough prototype with some free assets and I was suddenly hooked. 

I must've spent a good 80% of my time just trying to get the possession system to work the way I wanted it to. I wanted it to feel like the torch was the main character, and when a person dies they drop the torch and you're left waiting there as an inanimate object until someone else comes and picks you up. I ran into countless bugs and issues like the NPCs not picking up the torch, or passing the torch back and forth meant the AI controller refused to repossess the character and it would stand there idle indefinitely. Eventually I got to a point where I was... Satisfied with how it works. It's still very buggy and I know if I had the heart and energy to do so I could wipe all the code related to the system and start fresh and it would be much cleaner and more efficient. But I'm tired now so I think I'll take a break for a little while.

Overall I had a blast, learned a lot about controllers, AI, packaging and releasing a game, but most of all I learned that I really truly absolutely adore programming, but I despise level design. Next game jam I'm definitely gonna try to hook up with a team.