Gamecraft January 2024 Game Jam

This weekend I participated in the 48-hour Gamecraft January 2024 Game Jam, which had the theme of Freeze. For it, using Unity we created Freezeria After Dark, a horror shooter game where you would murder horrifying monsters to turn them into ice cream.

I think the Jam went alright. I joined a team that had already been established and I was able to fit in well and contribute to the team in meaningful ways; however, the game itself was very buggy and ugly.

I think the team was well organized and there were very few communication or organizational issues. However, most of the team had never worked in engine which was something I spent much of the jam working to change. While this will make the team much more productive in future jams, it did slow down just about the whole team for this one.

We also lacked a dedicated designer so there was no one actually playing and playtesting the game which resulted in us being blindsided by a mountain of bugs an hour before the deadline.

Overall I think the best place to improve moving forward is to work on the team's engine knowledge so that everyone on the team is at least a tiny bit familiar with the engine so they can import their own work, and playtest if they finish early.