Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Based on the experience in game development and game development, Shaanxi excellent Employment editor collates all the experiences and lessons about game engine, coding and fast game development. Come and have a look!

1. Limit the scale

It's easy to want to do a big adventure game or something that can compare to your favorite game. If you have some experience, it may be cool to pursue something that goes beyond the game Jam activity, but don't overestimate the time you have. One of the things I appreciate about the game Jam activity is that it forces you to quickly change a game from a conceptual stage to a final product because your time is very limited. This is why limiting scale is so important.

The theme of this Open Jam is "leaving a trail". As soon as the topic came out, my friends and I began to discuss what kind of games were suitable for the theme. One idea is to make a 3D boxing game in which players can leave scars on their enemies. I have almost no experience in 3D games, and if I want to do it well, I have to spend too much time learning how to make the marks reasonable and effective before I even discover the playability.

2. Play as soon as possible

This is my most pertinent suggestion for game Jam activities. Try to make the core mechanism to write the code quickly so that you can test and decide whether it is worth making a complete game. There should not be only a few hours left before your game can be played. For a three-day event like Open Jam, you shouldn't spend more than a few hours making a running demonstration.

3. Keep it simple

Each feature you want to add will extend the entire development time. Because you can't get it up and running quickly, there's no way to know if it takes a lot of time to submit a new feature. High-scoring arcade-style works tend to perform well in game Jam activities, and they are inherently simple. Once the core is complete, you can start adding features and retouching without having to worry about whether the game is functioning properly in the end.

4. Get inspiration from other games

You may want to make a completely original work, but a prototype that can be developed based on it is extremely useful. This will save time for repetitive work, because you already know what's interesting. Tell yourself that the more practical experience you have, the easier it is to make big games that contain your own ideas, so you can also get good practice from recreating the works of others.

Considering Open Jam's "leaving traces" theme, I think it would be interesting to create a game where you can leave traces of paint while playing, so you can also see the marks you left behind. I remember an old-fashioned animation game called Line Rider 2 Beta (later called Paint Rider), and I knew that holding down the Control key while playing could make a trace of the egg. I simplified the concept and even needed only one button to move vertically. More like an old-fashioned airplane game. After about an hour or two into the Jam activity, I had a basic model that could move up and down with a button and leave traces of a small black circle.

5. Don't ignore the availability

Make sure as many people as possible can play your game. A game submitted to Open Jam is a virtual reality game. Cool as it is, few people can play because not many people own VR devices. Fortunately, its developers don't expect to get a good ranking, they just want to practice. But if you want to share your game with people (or win game Jam activities), it's important to pay attention to availability.

Godot (and most other game engines) allows you to publish games on all major platforms. When submitting games, especially in Itch.io, there is a browser version that supports most people to play. But release it on more platforms and operating systems as much as you can. I even tried to release Paint Rider on mobile, but the technology was limited.

6. Don't make it too difficult

If the game takes too much energy to learn or play, you will lose some of your players. It is important to keep it simple and limited in size during the game planning phase. Again, it's easy to come up with a big game idea that takes ten and a half days to develop; the hard part is to make a fun, simple game.

After introducing Paint Rider to my mother, she quickly began to play. I don't think I need to explain more to her.

7. Don't be too neat

If you're used to spending time on design patterns and making sure your code is reusable and adaptable, try to relax a little bit. If you spend too much time thinking about design, when you finally get to play the game, you may find that the game is not very interesting and it will be too late to modify it.

This process also applies to simplifying more stringent games: quickly code out a proof concept demonstration model until you find something worthy of a complete game, and then you can build perfect code to support it. Creating games for game Jame activities is like a rapid development of a verifiable model.

8. But don't be too casual

Spaghetti code, on the other hand, can easily get out of control, even if the game developer doesn't have a lot of code. Fortunately, most game engines take design patterns into account. Take the signaling function of Godot, for example, nodes can send data messages to their "connected" nodes-this is the observer mode that your design automatically shapes. As long as you know how to take advantage of the features of this game engine, you can write code quickly, and your code will not be particularly difficult to read.

9. Get feedback

Show people what you're doing. Let them try and see what they say. See how they play your game and see if they find anything unexpected. If the game Jam activity has a Discord channel or something like that, put your game on it and people will give you feedback on your ideas. One of the definite functions of Paint Rider is the canvas loop, so you can see the paintings you left behind. I didn't even consider the mechanism until someone asked me why the game didn't exist.

If you work as a team, make sure there are people who can deliver feedback around you to participate in the development.

And don't forget to help others in the same way; if you find something that helps you play other people's games, it's a win-win situation.

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