Project Duration
Oct 2-5 2020
Overview
In my free time, I partook in my very first game jam, Ludum Dare. This is a bi-yearly game jam where you spend an entire weekend (72 hours) to complete a game made from scratch, based on a voted theme.
In my first game jam, I decided to go solo, since I wanted to use the experience to better my own game development skills, especially in areas that I would like to get more experience with (i.e. art, game design)
In the end, I took away many valuable lessons from this experience, ranging from game scope, artistic visions, and most importantly, concise gameplay.
Small sample of the core game loop
Design Proccess
The theme of the game jam was, Stuck in a Loop. I interpreted this as being in a sushi conveyor belt restaurant, trying to survive the onslaught of hungry customers.
Hence, the game I made is called Hunger Pains, a survival game where you have last as many rounds (pun intended) of chopsticks grabbing you.
The gameplay is fairly basic, with movement in all directions, but because you are on a conveyor belt, you are limited in how much space you have to outmaneuver the main obstacle of the game, chopsticks."
Initial Brainstorm of the project, initially called Sushi Chef
The initial design of the game focused centrally on the theme, designing the gameplay around it.
The idea of people eating at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant set the stage up for some interesting gameplay challenges.
This lead to a game design concept of a mini challenge round, where the player has to survive a random challenge that is thrown at them, in a series of rounds.
Some of the round ideas that I had (which one ultimately came through) were:
- A challenge where you sneak by people to avoid detection (the one that the game focused on)
- A challenge where the player has to choose to hide behind specific items, surviving a certain number of turns in that round before they can proceed (scrapped)
- A challenge where the player is ‘caught’, but attempts to resist getting captured, via a button mashing event (scrapped)
I also wanted to do more with the conveyor belt gimmick itself, but due to time constraints, the only element that had the conveyor belt was the limited movement.
Nevertheless, the decision to scrap these ideas helped led this project to completion, since time was the biggest challenge in this game jam.
Mock up of menus, UI flow, as well as a list of tasks to accomplish
Time Management
Speaking of time, I wanted to mock up all of the art for the game (UI and player) in advance so that I can focus my time on the gameplay mechanics. Hence, I created some rough diagrams of how I wanted the game screens to look like.
I also organized my thoughts out on what needs to be done, prioritizing tasks as they came up.
This especially came up on the last day where I had a lot of artwork that still needed to be done
Concept art of player as well as task planning for 2nd and 3rd day of the jam
My planning on these days along with getting the important tasks outlined played a large part in myself getting this game done to a completed state.
While a lot of ideas had to get scrapped, I realized that sometimes, it is best to focus one’s attention to what the game currently has to offer and refine it.
Final Product
Cutscene leading to the next stage
The end result of the game was the following:
- A high score survival round based game
- Pseudo random obstacles in each round, with the difficulty (obstacle speed) increasing dynamically
- An atmosphere that brings back that old feeling of old school arcade games, in combination with the simple art style
Overall, I enjoyed making this game, and despite having some cut content, I found myself pleased with the end results. Below I linked some external links that you can follow to see more information about the game, which includes its GitHub Repository, a post mortem, and a link to the game itself (it is playable in browser!)
Screenshot of the main gameplay loop