Brackeys Game Jam 2021.1 "Stronger Together"

Day 1: After a stop at Starbucks for a good cup of coffee, I felt energized to look at the theme. Not too surprisingly, the theme that got the most votes was "Stronger Together" - a good classic :) I think I can work with that.

Not sure if I will really submitt a game, though the two days off on Thursday and Friday might come in handy for this jam. 

Before the jam actually started, I was toying around with finally programming a puzzle game. I think that would would be a nice challenge. I will take my notepad and scribble some ideas, but I right now I envision a rotation-based puzzle game, where you rotate 90 degrees and use gravity to your advantage to solve puzzles. With the theme being "stronger together" I can envison two blobs that you need to combine to be strong enough to break through a door. Maybe? Let's do some brainstorming and report in later!

Ok, so I have decided to go with that idea. My main focus this jam will not be artwork or story, instead: CORE GAMEPLAY! Gamplay and mechanics first is my motto! If I want to have a good and also challenging puzzle, I need to think about the different possibilities that the controls could be used to overcome challenges. 

Possible Mechanics that the player can learn to overcome obstacles:

• Simple 1x rotation: makes the Player drop down -> reach targets that are left or right of you 
• Simple 2x rotation: makes the Player fall "up" -> reach targets that are above the player
• Right/Left or Left/Right Moonwalk -> reach targets on the same platform that are left or right of you
• 4x rotation: makes the Player jump ahead -> reach targets that are right/left of you with a gap in between

Amazing artwork at the end of day one:

Day 2 and 3 were used to do some research on what constitutes good puzzle games. It turns out that there are two really good videos (I should link them after the jam) which talk about Portal and Thalos Principle, two really great game gems. It helped me understand the value of introducing the puzzle mechanics step by step and not overloading the player with too difficult puzzles.

Day 4: Joa joined in and produced some awesome music - as always! Love this guy! I decided to do some level design based on my newly acquired knowledge - feeling fairly happy about progress. I invited a few folks to do some early playtesting and most people like the game, eventhough it is REALLY simplistic. In a way it is much different than my usual games that focus on aesthetics and story - none of which this game has haha!

Day 5: I colored the platforms a bit differently to align with a consistent color palette and created a simple menu. This is what the game looks like today:

Thinks I still need to work on today:

• Include the music and make it loop rather than start over each level
• Add the instructions to the Menu
• Change the font to match the ASCII style
• Maybe change the L and R key to be more logical (arrow keys)
• Victory screen and restart screen
• Watch again Jonas' video on 5 ways to make games more fun to get inspiration
• Find out why the WebGL build does not work (not installed, but it IS installed!)

For some reason the WebGL build will just NOT WORK. I installed it, unity did not recognize it; googled the entire internet, finally it was installed, but the compiled version was stuck at the unity logo screen...Apart from that, I managed to get Joa's fantastic music into the game, changed the font and added a quick victory screen and  that's it for day 5.

Yey! Got the webGL version to work! Tried 100 different combinations to get it to work and not sure what did the trick in the end, but let's just move on :()

Results

Yey! There were 1889 submissions and I am really happy about my score in the FUN category (= top 6% of all games!):

I think the key this jam was to have ONE key mechanic and putting that at the core of gameplay; often times I just had a common genre like an endless runner and tried to fit it the theme; I should really acknowledge that next time! People seem to enjoy that game, so maybe I will continue working on it at some point :)

Thanks for everyone who played and voted!