Experiences Gained
- Further understanding of Unity, especially Unity3D
- More C# knowledge
- Working with lighting, especially baking lighting into a scene
- Better group collaboration
- Workflow prioritization
General Information
Role: Lead developer
Duration: 48 hours
Team-Size: 10 people
Software used:
A short platformer where you discover the lost memories of a student as a keychain gecko charm.
Project Background
This was my first Game Jam that I have participated in, and was tumultuous but fun. We were limited to a 48 hour period, with the theme “Lost and Found”. Our group consisted of 12 people with some jumping in and out due to outside interferences. This helped a lot in us being able to make a 3D game with a lot of art available as well as working out how to code a full 3D game with minimal experience of it before.
We came up with the idea of a game where you play as a keychain charm to find keys hidden around a persons room, and with those keys the persons memories. We decided upon a gecko after a few concept arts, and wanted narration of the persons memories so I did a lot of the voice-acting for the game.
Challenges along the way:
With this many people we had to find some way to coordinate quickly and efficiently. We decided to go with Unity as that was our most familiar engine, and then set up a Trello as well as a Github to collaborate through, and individual scenes to develop everything in unity. In the beginning everything worked quite well, but towards the final hours of the project everything had to be compiled to one final scene, but due to unity’s scene structure only one person can work on a scene at a time to avoid merge conflicts. This resulted in a halt where only 2 people could really do any effective work at any time, and delayed us a lot. This could have been handled a lot better through a better pipeline of assets being added quicker to the final scene, especially the art assets which unfortunately were a bit delayed and not so efficiently made, specifically with origin points sometimes being all over the place. These are things that could have gone better but are also a good learning experience.
Link to Game:
https://globalgamejam.org/2021/games/keycko-2