Summer 2020 Game Jams

During the endless amount of quarantine time I had this summer, I was excited to take part in two different game jams with my friends. Not only was I able to strengthen my programming skills, but also my remote collaboration tool-set as this is becoming increasingly useful today especially considering the current context.

Solely Basil

Submitted for the simply-named Quarantine Jam, this game was a single-player, frantic Amazon warehouse worker game where you had to pack swiftly-moving boxes according to their packing list before they were shipped off to your customers.

This game was built in 48 hours in Unity 2020 with a team of seven people. I worked with two other programmers on various systems such as inventory, random order generation, item pickup, modular conveyor belts, and player movement.

What I got most out of building this game were the skills needed to be a lead programmer as the two other programmers I worked with were much less experienced with Unity scripting and collaborating with other programmers in general.

Last Mage

This game was submitted for Weekly Game Jam 149. It is a game where you play as a mage whose goal is ascend a mountain and a castle to reach the top. Your primary movement ability is a grapple rope that you can fire and will pull you toward the object that was hit.

This game was built in Unreal Engine 4.25 in roughly five days and a team of eight people. I worked with the same two programmers who were using Unreal for the first time. The whole game was written in C++ rather than using Unreal’s blueprints system. We did this for two reasons: firstly, I wanted to learn how to script for Unreal in C++ because I was already comfortable with C++ outside of Unreal, and also we had to program the grapple mechanic from scratch and that would have been near impossible to do using just blueprints.

I learned lot from this game because Unreal C++ was an entirely new territory for me even though I was comfortable with other aspects of the engine.

In summary, both of these game jams kept me on my toes this summer, always learning new things and improving my game development and team skills before starting my capstone project at Champlain College this fall semester.