My first game jam

Hi all, I thought I'd talk about my process during the game jam and what I built for it. I've been in game jams before, but never really finished anything. This was the first time I've really put an effort into completing a project for a game jam, so I'd like to talk about the experience. 

A youtube short popped up about Brackey's game jam and the theme. The idea got into my head of creating a Slay the Spire like game, where cards would have variants to them that had some risk associated with using them. I was unfortunately a day late as I hadn't seen the advertisement until Tuesday, however that day looked up my subscriptions and found https://www.youtube.com/@thecodeotter who had created a series detailing an interesting architecture for building a slay the spire like game. I spent the day consuming that content (it was very well elaborated upon) and by the end of the day, I had a basic skeleton for my game. The day after is when I got to work on the surrounding content that I wanted to built. 

The first thing I worked on was the risk cards. Risk cards are cards with greater effects than regular cards, but they have some sort of detriment to the player. This is an example of a regular card in my game:

A very basic effect that deals damage to an enemy and applies the burn status to them. When the player presses the risk mode button, all of the cards are flipped and the background changes to represent the risk.

As can be seen, the damage it does to the enemy is greater, however it now comes with the side effect of burning the player. This was the premise of the game. Having these risk cards and using them at the appropriate time. However when I started I wasn't sure if battles would be enough to pressure players into using a risk card. Due to that, I also added a game timer that counts down after every enemy round. Once this timer reaches 0, the player loses automatically.

I spent some time attempting to make a map akin to slay the spire, however I ended up wasting too much time making something that was buggy and prone to issues, so I ended up scrapping that for something much simpler: a simple UI with buttons that take you to your next destination:

This allowed there to be some glue between battles; something to space them out and allow the user to have some sort of selection. Unfortunately as I'm not an artist, I didn't get a chance to make some nice art or even basic images for the path select screen.

This leads to art. I did this project as a solo developer. I'm not an artist by any stretch of the imagination. I know (sort of) how to use inkscape and that's about it. The art I was relatively happy with is my card backs: I made them those little checkboard cookies that my wife was kind enough to bake that day.

Unfortunately, art took up a fair chunk of my time. I did end up learning quite a bit on how to use inkscape that I didn't know before. The most I've used inkscape is for one of my previous games for mobile: Dog Drop'n Merge. 

Based off of the status effect system that was built from the video series from CodeOtter, I expanded the status effects to include poison, exposure, exhaustion, revenge, rage and regeneration. Poison doing damage through armour (as opposed to burn that did damage to armour first), exposure having the inflicted party receive extra damage, exhaustion reducing the amount of mana available per turn, revenge dealing damage back to the attacker, rage increasing the damage a fighter could do and regeneration... well... regenerating its target per turn. I did have a few others planned, however I ran out of time so they will be waiting for the next version.

One of the things I really didn't get a chance to complete was the reward screen. Like slay the spire and other games, once you've finished a battle, you're given a reward. In the current game jam version, you can only receive cards from a set list (and sometimes the options will be exactly the same). This reward UI is currently hiding quite a few elements, which I'm hoping to show off in a future release.

I designed the enemies with the concept of a brain. A brain is a scriptable object that essentially stores a set of attacks that the brain decides how to use. In the game jam version of the game, there are only two brains; random (which isn't used) and sequential, which goes through the attack list in sequence and performs those attacks. 

At a later date, when I have better brains (I include myself in this), I want the brains to be able to react a bit more to the situation around them (are my allies hurt? Am I a coward that should run when I'm under some health?)

I also worked on some basic dialogue events (only 3 made it into the game jam version), which had some effect that would trigger on making a decision. 

This allowed for some basic choices to be made, but the most important choice is made at the start:

Depending upon the choice that the player takes, they will start with a different set of cards. Ideally, this UI would allow room for an image and not just have text, but that will have to wait for later.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with what was produced. I don't usually make an effort in most things; I'm a pretty lazy guy, however when it came to this I can sincerely say that I put 100% into it. I uploaded about 2 and a half hours before the deadline and relaxed. It was a nice feeling knowing that even if there were some minor bugs, it wasn't going to bother me. It was just... fun. I don't usually have fun while programming, since I do non-game development programming for work, but this was just plain fun.

I've seen a few of the other entries and I've witnessed the discord community that was in this game jam. It was incredible to see so many people bring their ideas to life and how much passion was pushed into their projects. I grew up in a community that didn't particularly place much emphasis on video games being interesting; they were a nerdy pass time that few people my age would involve themselves with outside of a few rounds of Mario kart. It does my heart good to see so many people loving video games and building them, loving the media that I've grown up with and obsessed over for so long.

Thank you for reading, it was nice to have somewhere to talk about this process. As for what's next, I'm hoping to create a new build each week after the game jam is over. Some things that will be addressed such as the font (thank you for the feedback to those that played and told me the font was an issue; I genuinely didn't realise how unreadable it was) and a few new features are coming for the next version. I guess at that point I'll start versioning them. I hope to turn this into a project that lands on steam at some point, so we'll see how it goes. 

Fun fact: Kurabiyem means "My cookie" in Turkish.