Week 1 (9.20 - 9.24) - The Game Jam

During our second game jam, we were able to prototype our game's core mechanic, which is getting from point A to B without running out of health (in our case, moistness). Health is replenished by standing in puddles of water. The prototype (v0.0) is very primitive, we didn't have time to apply textures or Skippy's walking animation, and the menu/end screens are very simple. The health bar was actually a bunch of cubes connected to the camera!

While the game jam was smoother than our first one, we still faced various challenges. One of the struggles from the coding side was to implement climbing, but we could not figure out how to make Skippy's model rotate when he climbed, so it looked like he was just ascending. From the arts and music side, we had a bit of a hiccup when trying to integrate everything together due to varying file types, but we implemented most of the assets we wanted by the end of the game jam anyway.

For the next steps, we need to work with the art team to finalize the game's art style, and hopefully get an updated Skippy model. We also want to work on the tutorial level, which gives a brief glimpse into Skippy's past life, before leading into the first level. We should also remake the health bar so it's actually UI instead of a physical object.

The CS people were working on different aspects of the game on different computers. It would have been easier had we planned the entire system out beforehand, specifically what classes to write and how objects would interact with each other, but we didn't have the time. In the future we need to plan out the code's design, maybe use UML diagrams or something like that.