Adventure jam 2022
2022-07-07 · gamejam· gamedev· unity· crossplatform· desktop
I like the idea of hackathons when strangers gather together to create some stuff, sometimes for the sake of process rather than result. It’s a nice way to learn something new or try a new role. My friend gathered a small team to participate in Adventure jam 2022 (opens new window) and I decided to join.
# Game engine
During the jam I learned about Unity (opens new window) and one of its toolkits - Adventure creator (opens new window) (AC). Unity doesn’t need an introduction these days, it’s a popular game engine. AC is a toolkit with rich features out of the box such as interaction system, dialogs with text and voice, camera and scene control, and visual scripting. The last one is especially useful for scripting for people without good Unity knowledge or programming skill in general. I had a little gamedev background but haven’t worked with Unity before, yet I was able to start quickly. Also I did a little C# scripting to bind an AC variable to an animation parameter, but it came back to bite me with cryptic errors minutes before the first submission was due :D Fortunately I've found a way around quickly.
# My roles
I built and scripted two scenes and helped with other parts of the game and bugfixing. Windows was our main platform but I managed to make builds for MacOS and Linux afterwards, which deserves individual post. Also I’ve tried to voice act for the first time and voiced two characters after getting used to listening my own voice :D
# Version control
Another thing to mention is storage. Our unity project has a size of about 30GB with all the spare assets to use for scene building. Apparently Plastic SCM (opens new window) was a better choice comparing to GitHub LFS (opens new window) with its quite limited bandwidth.
# Result
The team didn’t have much gamedev experience mostly, we struggled to follow the big scope of the original game script and features, and cut or simplified some parts of the game. But in the end we managed to make something playable, we made a game with 8 3D levels and different gameplay types. I think this is a pretty good achievement considering all the factors and short timeframe. The development was a bit chaotic and crunchy, but I enjoyed it, learnt something new and had a lot of fun :D The jam voting isn’t over at this moment, but it doesn’t matter that much. Use the link (opens new window) to check out the game.