Development Upadate, Improve My Game Jam #10

Overview

This was our second game jam. We set out to improve the game we built at our first game jam, the GMTK Game Jam, two weeks ago. The theme for the previous jam was ‘Out of Control’ and we wanted to continue our game, but also stay within the limits of the original jam. 

Goals

Our primary goal for this development cycle was to improve the game from it’s previous version and fix some bugs that remained in the last iteration. We wanted to fix some rendering errors that could cause the text on screen to be cut off at certain aspect ratios. Also of concern were our player controls which in the previous build had a speed value that was too high and overall felt very clunky and were difficult to control. A large feature update we wanted to focus on adding sound to the game, and improving the player model. 

Approach

We started by thoroughly planning out the improvements we wanted to make on Trello. We prioritized these by trying to find a balance between skills we wanted to learn or improve and tasks that would be the greatest enhancement to the gameplay.

What was completed

The final visual improvements consisted mostly of minor improvements that simply made the game more enjoyable to play. To begin, we fixed a bug where the name of the game wasn’t being displayed on the main menu. Following the main menu, some dialogue was added to the scene where the player gets turned into a frog. Now there is a very slight bit of context and information as to why the player is a frog. Then, the animator was modified with additional parameters so the proper animation plays when it should. Originally there wasn’t time to add these so for some reason there was just a coroutine with a fairly arbitrary time delay that would reset the animation after a jump. Lastly, scene transitions were added which make the game flow better and add some polish.

The sound effects and music that were added should be considered major because the initial game had none whatsoever. An excellent soundtrack was composed that plays throughout the game and is around as long as it takes to beat the game, so there isn’t much repetition. Sound effects were added for actions such as speech bubbles, pickups, jumping, and enemy collisions. These make the game seem much more immersive. 

The majority of other changes were to improve the playability and enjoyability of the game. Enemies now patrol more smoothly and no longer enter walls and rocks. The camera has constraints at the edges of the level, which makes scene traversal feel much more natural. The player movement was iterated upon numerous times to get where it is now. Most of the improvements with the movement were motivated by the need to be able to rapidly control the frog once they were forced to jump, have enough time to move toward their target landing spot, and not be ridiculously fast. Lastly, the game now tracks how far a player progresses and allows them to continue from where they left off at the main menu.