Gamecraft January Jam 2023

This weekend I participated in the Gamecraft January 2023 which had the theme of Leave it Behind. For this jam, we made Sugar High Noon, a twin-stick-shooter, dungeon-crawler game where you must leave behind your guns to progress. I designed the mechanics and level in addition to coding the player, weapons, and map elements.

I believe that the jam went pretty well. The game was mostly complete with all art, sound, and mechanics implemented, though it was nearly impossible to beat and a little buggy. We had far more assets in made and in-game for this jam than any others I've participated in and the mechanics were simple and quickly agreed upon by the team within 30 minutes of the start of the jam.

The biggest problem with the jam was the poor balance which was caused by a simple lack of time. The issue may have been avoidable had the artists been able to import their art themselves as in this jam none of the artists had working versions of Unreal on their computers, and so the programmer had to be sent the assets and then import them manually. Not only did this take away time from coding, but since we programmers were the only ones with Unreal we were also the only ones able to balance and playtest the game. Next jam we plan on having everyone ensure Unreal is working on their computers before the next jam.

Overall the project was well-organized, modular, and expandable meaning that it was easy for us to add all of the features we wanted, and I and a few others on our team will likely update the game shortly with balance improvements and bug fixes.