My First Game Jam Experience

So today the Brackeys Game Jam 2021.2 started and I went right to work. As a first time participant in a game jam I was really nervous but excited to see what I could do. I don't have a significant amount of time in my week so I knew that I had to make the most of what time on the weekend I had. I was working on it for about 8 hours or so today and it was really fun to put together the pieces for this game Cowboys in Space. 

At first I only had the theme to work with. I had a funny name typed on my phone that I coworker had told me. I had looked it up and I guess they were trying to tell me about a movie called Space Cowboys. I decided to change the phrasing and call my game Cowboys in Space. From here I went right to making and finding some assets. I'm not exactly an artist so if you couldn't tell from the stick figure art from MS Paint, got some backgrounds from  VectorPixelStar (vectorpixelstar.itch.io), pixel planets from Indigoli (indigoli.itch.io), and music from Abstraction (abstractionmusic.com).

By this time I had a little bit more things to work with, so I was able to quickly program up how the player would interact with the game and generally how the gameplay would function. I didn't mean to program it so the player would slide after pressing the WASD keys but decided that that as well as bouncing off of the boundaries of the screen would make up how the player would move.

I used some code from my other game, Tale of a Winter Sale to make the planets be fired at the player so the player would have to dodge them. The larger planets are slower while the smaller planets are faster. I thought this was a decent balance in difficulty for a game that was only really meant to be played a couple of times. There are also some horse powerups that are pretty rare but make you invincible for a short time.

The last thing I did was create a barebones menu system to navigate between the different Unity scenes. 

In total the project took me about 7:30 - 8 hours and it was really cool to see every come together in such a short amount of time. This was really challenging for a single dev such as myself and I was personally very proud to see the end result. If there are any bugs brought to my attention I will likely try and go fix them but I am really happy to leave the game like this. I have never had very good luck with WebGl builds and my Unity canvas' so If I was going to go back I might try and fix the different people I listed in the credits being too close together on the WebGl.

I hope you check out my game and all of the others that get submitted for the Brackeys Game Jam 2021.2 as I'm sure the other submissions are quality. The jam ends 8/29 at 6AM so make sure to come back and vote on some of the games!