One of the members of the team wrote a post mortem, I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Hi, I’m Adrien Carta, one of the 0 Heaven game developers. Before writing about the game development itself, I’d like to thank the other members of our team, they worked until the last second to realize our hardest and biggest jam game at this time. We are students, and it’s so hard and painful to make a rogue like with generated content in so little time!

Talking about it, here is the team :

• Luca Formicola at Sound Design

• Gregoire Carabeufs at Game Coding and Game Design

• Paul Maurer at Game coding and Game Design

• Louis Cabrera at Game Coding

• Christophe Galati, at wonderful graphisms

• and me

So we started development of 0 Heaven like 10 hours after the begining of the jam, because we were in class before that. It was so horrible to think about the jam all the day without having the possibility to start working on it.

When we finally got time to work, we decided to divide the game in several modules, and work individually on each of them, to be the faster we could.

That decision could have been a terrible one if one of the module was too hard for a developer, because he would have lost a lot of time, alone, in front of his code, waiting for the help of the other members of the team.

But globally, each developer succeed to make it alone.

The modules were the 3C, of course (character, controller and camera), the semi-procedurally generated map (a big one), the weapon system, which had to be the more flexible to let us add the more weapon we could, and the enemies and their properties.

We used Github and Unity all the time, and had to carefully NEVER work on the same Unity scene, because a scene conflict is a pain which cost a lot of wasted time. So the modules system helped us to not be in conflict with the others.

We worked this way until about 6 hours before the deadline. Then we started to make a main game scene. We carefully incorporated in it each individual part of the game.

At this time, the conflict game started, but happily none of them was really hard to resolve.

Paul said he was happy to finally see the game in ONE piece, because all this time we worked on little individual pieces and we didn’t have the satisfaction to see a working game, or even a prototype !

It’s really dangerous to work this way because you can realize only about 3 hours before the deadline you totally failed something in Game Design or in a specific module and it’s too late to debug/change something.

That didn’t happen for us, but we had bugs we needed to resolve before the deadline. We tried to “fix them all”, but fixing a bug rushing for a deadline is the best way to create new ones !

So the final build has some bugs, but we hope none of them completely breaks the experience for our players :)

Anyway, I’m proud of the result, and very happy to see the positive supports players gave us !

It was really cool to work on this game jam :D

If you want to play it :http://gamejolt.com/games/arcade/0-heavens/39784/

Cya!