Introduction
During the Alakajam 22 game jam, I created The Yield. The theme was Under the Surface, and I had 2 days complete the game. This time I decided to do my first ever solo-jam. I didn’t enlist anyone to help. Spooooky. Let’s see how it worked out…
Timeline
Friday Day 0 - Theme Announced
The theme was announced at 2pm my local time on a Friday. Unfortunately for me, I was at work and had a lot of crunching to do on day-job stuff. As soon as I got home, I booted up my Twitch stream and started working on the game. I got a lot of the bones done within the 7hr stream. The game idea I landed on was making a digging game similar to the old flash game Motherload.
Below is a screenshot of how the tile generation and upgrade data looks like. Quick and dirty json data. The image on the right is determining the probability tables for different ores. I had 8 different tables like that depending on the height, the one you’re seeing there is the one at the absolute bottom tier of tiles.
Saturday Day 1
Saturday morning came along and before I could work on the game I had 3 important tasks. Do laundry and then meetup some friends for fun activities and dinner.
My dinner plans were over, so it was time to head home, take a small nap and begin working on the game. The only problem? I woke up from the nap on Sunday morning!
Sunday Day 2
Here we are on Sunday morning and I have to go to work again! Darn it…
Fast forward to coming home after work, I boot up the Twitch Stream again and get back to work. Determined to finish everything I still needed to do. Upgrades screen, progression, saving and loading, scene transitions, sound effects, etc.
Welp. I didn’t manage to get all of it done, but I did get all these fancy gems in, spawning at different depths and a working upgrade system.
It was time to submit and I still didn’t have solid scene transitions and there were a few bugs and no sound effects. What did I do instead of submitting? I pushed submission back 1 day so I can still participate in the 72hr category. This means my jam submission won’t get any ratings. C’est la vie (forgive me for my french).
Bonus! Monday Day 3
I had an extra day! Woweee. The problem? I also had to go to work on that day too. At least I had extra time. I ensured the level transitions, upgrading, running out of fuel, the hazards and everything was working properly and pressed submit.
I also squeezed in secret button commands that let the user cycle between different color palettes. I grabbed the color palettes according to old technology. 16 colors each. Here’s a gif of me cycling between them…
What Went Well
Considering I worked on this game for maybe 20hrs total. Entirely by myself. I think it’s a really great outcome. It has something like 20 minutes of gameplay as you mine deeper and deeper, seeing new gems, getting new upgrades, etc.
Challenges
The biggest challenge was the time crunch. I had so much going on that weekend and I was all alone on the game. I couldn’t lean on other people for help for art or audio. The final game jam submission basically had no audio except for a few voice lines I recorded for the upgrades screen.
If it wasn’t for making a game and a post-mortem being on my monthly goals for November, I might’ve just said “fuck it” and not submitted anything. We’ll see, based on what it ends up becoming, if that would’ve been better.
The Final Product
All that being said, I think the final product is solid. I would rate it a 7/10 game jam submission.
Reception
Because the game was submitted to the extra category of a pretty small game jam event, I got basically no reception. However I showed it to a handful of gamedev pals and go their take on it. I will take their advice and spend maybe 20hrs on it in the next few weeks to make a solid post-jam version.
The post-jam version will be posted to Newgrounds in December so stay tuned for that!
Links
- If you want to give the game a try, head over here! https://bluepinstudio.itch.io/the-yield
