In this game jam, I partnered up with one of my classmates to participate in the extra life game jam, and even though we might have not know what we were doing. It was still a good experience.
This year’s was funded by the organization Extra Life, which allows people to just play video games consecutively to help out children who might need money for their surgery or medication. The overall goal for the game jam was to raise money, a 1000 dollar exactly, and the goal was hit at the end of it.
This year’s theme was literally Extra Life, and at first me and my classmate did not understand what this actually was. We spent the evening after the speaker presentations trying to come up with a good plot for a story game that utilizes the ‘Extra Life’ theme. We eventually came up with this plot.
You are a special agent, and you have been tasked to steal important government artifacts by a man named Gru. He tells you that the security is very low at the area you are going to steal these items from, so you take this mission and you arrive at the place. Immediately, when you try to grab one of the items, it was connected to a hidden wire, which triggered the alarm, and you now have 60 seconds to steal all the other items before the cops come to the place and arrest. You eventually escape, but you accidentally trip on air, and you die.
You wake up in your room like nothing happened and you get that vengeance on Gru who had deceptively lied you, he probably stole those items immediately after you had died. So, you get the urge to find Gru, by questioning his connections, and eventually finding him in a warehouse with a bunch of goons. It turns out that Gru wasn’t a CIA agent, he was actually an international criminal and he needed those valuabes to sell it on the black market to criminals. You stop him, and he gets put in jail, and then a sigma jonkler edit plays (canon).
So, me and my friend decided to use the game engine teardown, since both of us had a good knowledge and we just started to learn about the mod editor, and how to create blocks and script parts. Teardown does not have a big of a community so weren’t able to find questions or problems on google so it was hard trying to solve bugs, and we tried to troubleshoot simple mistakes that took us about an hour.
We decided to shoot for a story-based game since Teardown is good if you want to make a story-based game, or simply mods or map, so I actually came up with the plot. When I explained it to my peers, who were mainly university adults and had real-life jobs, they told me that it had lots of plot-holes in which I had to change the plot multiple times until it had covered all the plot holes, and it was satisfying so that we could develop.
Unfortunately, when I tried to open the mod editor on Teardown, none of the textures of objects would load in for me, which make it difficult for me to work on it. So most of the work ended up in the hands of my friend, who felt a bit discouraged after a full day of working after Day 1. I was mainly there to support him, and to help to what to add to the game, to what to fix.
We ended up only being able to achieve one part o the game, which was the part where the player was steal the important government valuables aka ‘the heist level’. It was functioning and it was fun to make as well, and after the level, there was actually a cutscene that my friend made that was really well done, so I have to give props to my friend, his name is Bobby by the way, on the work that he done.
A thing that I would learn would probably to use a game engine next time that both of us had decent or good knowledge on so that it would be easier for the both of us.