As the voting period for the #IndiesVsGamers game jam nears its conclusion, I thought I’d write up my experiences of the event.

As this wasn’t my first game jam (I’ve participated in a couple of Ludum Dares in the past, completing my first earlier this year) I knew a little of what to expect, though as always seems to be the case I was caught up in a number of other obligations over the development weekend taking up almost all of Friday and half of Saturday. Thankfully I was able to limit the scope of my game such that there was an initial base of features that I could comfortably submit, followed by incremental add-ons should time permit (several enemy types were an example of this, while I had plans for boss levels every ten levels or so that I had to cut before the deadline).

Given the theme of ‘Arcade’, my first thoughts were to create a retro-style arcade game - while I was born a little late to fully experience such games, I have a lot of respect for the influence they had on modern entertainment. As such, I attempted to limit my design to the basic concepts of gaming, as well as restricting the colour pallete of the sprites (this totally has nothing to do with the fact that I’m not good at art, I swear). The sound effects within the game were produced using the Bfxr tool. As this is my first GameJolt submission it took a little while for me to set up the Unity API library, but once I had that sorted I was able to implement a scoreboard within my game surprisingly quickly.

Overall I’m fairly happy with how my game turned out - I was unable to fully implement my plans for boss fights or background music before the deadline hit and a few minor bugs slipped in before the deadline, but none of these issues can really be considered major faults. If I manage to get enough free time, I may look into making the further changes I had planned and releasing an updated version of the game.

There’s still a few hours left before the voting period closes; please take a look at my entry and tell me what you think!