Hello World!

Apparently there was a gamejam going on the last weekend called TheMeatlhyJam!

i shared the news with some of my students and ex-students hoping that a few of them would rise to the challenge and joined this gamejam so that i could actually book a lab or studio for us to work together.

alas, at first there were a few that voiced their interest, only one that actually messaged me about actually joining it.

it was my student Liang Wei.

i hope that he would actually joined this site an post some of his games, eventhough they’re assignments but its actually pretty good.

we came in, discussed on the main idea, come up with initial scetches and ideas, only to be thrown off course by the gamejams actual theme.

‘the life of a game dev’

truth be told, the initial idea was having the player saving kittens. the game would play out that the player would have to switch colours to attract a certain types of cats and then switch again to attract the remaining cats. the catch was that the cats that were not our colour would run away and might actually fall off a ledge or something. so that was the original idea.

then came the theme. so that idea was kinda out. so we devised a new concept. though i still wanted the cat to be in it.

so it evolved into a stealth kinda game, where we would play as the cat itself, slowly trying to approach Meatly (the game dev) from behind without making a sound or knocking off things and staying still whenever he turns around or something.

then after figuring out that it was too complicated, we just decided that it would be best that just have the cat manouver around the house without knocking off things throughout the game.

and it kinda worked.

the cat was cute. the whole game was colourful (maybe a little too colourful for me, but hey, im not the designer of this one) and it was actually fun, for us at least. there was a bit of a challenge at some point, though i wished that i had more time to work out more on the ending actually.

a lot of things were learned in this journey. i was experimenting on state machines in Unity c# but it was a hassle when the concept of reseting each of the level without loading the whole thing over again. so that kinda waste a lot of time. i have to fix that in the near future and try to approach it differently next time.

but i would like to give out a big thanks to Liang Wei. he stepped up when no one did. and he was not afraid of his ideas. it would be interesting to see if he would actually make a game by himself someday. but i couldnt have done this without him.

so kudos to my partner Wee Liang Wei. hopefully it was a good gamejam experience for you as it was for me.