This was my first ever game jam and I had a great time!

Goal:

My goal was to make a game that I'm legit proud of, not "well, it's OK for a jam" and I am happy with this game. I genuinely enjoy getting in there and playing it myself.

My Reaction:

I feel like it's a perfect game jam game since you have a very small learning curve with a good chance of finishing it quickly after a couple of tries. The challenge curve ramps up to "arcade fun" quickly so that even I have a chance of losing, even though I've played it a million times already.

Game Jam:

This is the Gamedev.tv 2024 challenge. We'll see how things go as submissions come in and reviews begin, but I have my fingers crossed! I think shows a high degree of polish, is a creative take on the theme of "last stand", and is genuinely fun to play. I can't think of anything I could realistically do to make this a better entry, so I'm very proud of my work. Hope others appreciate it too!

Development:

Game was created in under 7 days on the 10-day challenge in Game Maker with custom art made in Blender, my own VO work, and my terrific son providing audio sweetening and an original score! The lion's share of the dev work was done over the first weekend, which included Monday as Memorial Day in the US. I kind of obsessed for a few days. After I got the core: start > play > win / lose flow complete I was able to take a breather and go back to polish it all up. That step gave me a huge confidence boost and helped gain perspective.

I created all of the assets new for the game, except for the teddy bear, which I had made a year ago for an animation project, but I had never rigged or animated him, so all I had was the base model. I made the bunny model from scratch just to even the playing field and prove I could do that on time constraints. I think she's cute!

99% of the audio was new. I used 1 sound effect and an audio generator to make the pop gun sound. The rest is all original foley work.

Future plans:

If I ever revisit this, I would want to fix some of the glitches with ball vs claw physics. I might make gameplay longer. I also had an idea to flicker the lights into a black light / neon kind of look as you gain more points.