All Aboard was created at my first game jam, alongside several students from the University of Utah's EAE program. The theme for 2017 was waves.
The Team:
Andrew Radford - UI / Gameplay Programming / Game Design
Joey Weidman - Gameplay Programming / Game Design
Mike Breese - Peer Programming / Game Design
Kaleb Elmer - Modeling / Animating / Game Design
Andrew Taylor Johnson - Modeling / Rigging / Gameplay Programming / Game Design
Goals:
Work with a team with varied skills and create something new.
Scratch the itch of building a fun game in a very short amount of time.
Focus on MVP and the core experience of making a game before adding additional features.
Build something enjoyable that the team will enjoy expanding on over the next few months.
The team
All Aboard! is a 1-4 player party game where your crew attempts to steer a ship around a hazardous environment using your body weight.
At first we started with a very different idea that involved using waves to move ships around a harbor. One of the first things we did was create a very realistic looking wave mesh and an object to push the ships. Shortly after doing this we realized this wouldn't be a fun idea and decided to scrap it and make a multi player game. I thought that it we would need to make it single player to fit within the 48 hour timeframe, but the team assured me we could make it work.
The environment of the game jam was a bit overwhelming. Previous games I worked on would be solo or when a team has been involved important parts were built before they were brought in. Because of this, it was a bit crazy getting setup with Github and HackNPlan and making sure everyone knew what they should be doing. I enjoyed this change to a fast pace hectic environment, but breathing room would be nice.
These were people I didn't know but did know each other (just like joining a new studio). While I had picked up some programming skills, and have a very clear understanding of Unity these were people who were going to school to learn these skills so I did feel like I should follow their lead. Kaleb and Drew started working on the ship and characters respectively. Joey and I worked programming the gameplay while Andrew created the main menu and multiplayer functions.
Day 1 - Friday
The first day consisted of internet problems and getting set up. Drew brought in two extra laptops to cover our bases, but this did not save us from 50+ people all trying to download at the same time. It was difficult to get online, and Joey wasn't able to install Unity on the computer he was using. After hours of trying I lent him mine (he was the stronger coder after all) and I would bounce around helping out where I was needed. I helped Kaleb with the design of the ship, before sitting down with Joey to help resolve gameplay concerns.
Lucky for me I familiar with the kind of code we needed to write and we were able to fix some issues. The biggest challenge was to get the tilt of the ship to go back and forth. By adding weight to the ship's sides we could get it to tilt, but it took, even more, weight to tilt back. We took a break to talk through the problem and realized we were never removing the weight when we left that side.
By the end of the night, we had a basic ship model that would tilt depending on how many people were on each side. A great looking login screen that 1-4 players could launch from and a wave mesh for it all to take place on. Not bad given the short amount of time we had on day 1.
Day 2 - Saturday
Saturday is where things got bad. We had all gone home for the night and planned to meet back up first thing in the morning. Unfortunately, we had a snow storm and I wasn't able to leave my house so I logged on from home. Frustrating, but not a major setback and I could still contribute. Lucky for the rest of the team, they live rather close to the game jam and were able to make it in. However, this was impeded by a 7-hour long power outage. This left the building full of people without much to do. They were still able to work on their laptops but couldn't commit anything and gave us the duration of a laptop's battery life to get everything done. We had some catching up to do on the final day.
Day 3 - Sunday
On Sunday the power was back on but the heater was not. I picked up some hand warming packs for the team and headed in. While the whole event was basically crunch time Sunday really felt like it, we had so much we wanted to do but only half a day to finish and get the game uploaded and ready to show. We created some hazards that would sink the ship, and created the sinking animation, along with a game over, and player respawn. When it finally came time to show the game we didn't even have time to create a win condition, and our wave hazard didn't have a model. We did have waves for the boat to ride on, so I think we managed to hit the theme. We uploaded it to the game jam site and when to the presentation room.
Player log in
Scope
When you work on a game, feature creep is a real thing, you want to include everything but you have something you need to ship by the due date. When it's your own game without a release date you can spend as much time working on it as you like. With a game jam, you get all the freedom to build whatever you want with a small team, but you have none of the time to expand on them.
This was great because it kept us focused on the core gameplay, and what is fun. We had plenty of ideas for things like an endless mode, players lives, objects to interact with and add weight to the ship. This helped us distil everything down to what the absolutely necessary, and everything else comes after a good core concept.
I think if I were to lead future projects I would want to capture this feeling at the beginning. Obviously, this would depend on the scale of the game, building an MMO takes far longer. This is a good way to get the team excited and building a fun core loop before expanding on it.
As a team, we hope to expand All Aboard! We plan to spend some time planning the game, and as time allows put more into it. We have already begone work on some small additions and are excited to get back to work. You can view our game jam page at the link below.