My First Game Jam - The Last Glacier

I’d never taken part in a game jam before, but itch.io made a perfect suggestion for me a few weeks ago: My First Game Jam - Winter 2020.

The theme of the jam was “cold” which fit with the other game I’ve been working on–Snow Day–but the rules wouldn’t allow me to enter an existing game. I decided I wanted to write a basic little survival game sort of like Don’t Starve crossed with wilderness survival show Alone.

The time limit was 2 weeks, and I knew that wouldn’t be enough time for me to make much progress in LibGDX, based on my little experience with Snow Day, so I downloaded Unity and Unreal. I fairly quickly settled on Unity, partially because of the other game devlogs I’ve seen. It seems like a really good way to rapidly prototype a game.

Over the course of the first few days I made some fairly major changes. It went from a human trying to survive the cold (like a lot of other entries into the game jam), to an ice cube trying to survive the heat. This had the added advantage of not having to animate a character. Ice cubes are easy, even for someone of my questionable skill. The name The Last Glacier came to me at some point, and I think it might be influenced by the fact that I’ve watched David Wehle’s GDC talk about completing The First Tree at least three times in the last month.

I switched the genre from survival to runner, which was intended to simplify a bunch of terrain generation work. I wanted to have a story, so it wasn’t intended to be an infinite runner, but something more akin to the spirit of Journey, but much less good.

I opted to import some tree assets from the Asset Store because I realized I was no good with Blender. It took me well over half an hour to make a campfire with no fire (which is really just sticks). Another half an hour was spent creating an igloo that is essentially a sphere chopped in half with a hollowed cube on the front of it (to fit the ice cube). I didn’t even end up using that in the game.

I spent a couple of days getting terrain to generate in a straight line ahead of you, and then a little while longer to generate trees in the right places, but I got something that was passable and needed to move on.

Adding in a health/damage system was surprisingly easy, but the code was getting pretty messy by this point. Lots of game objects were heavily tied to things that shouldn’t really be related. I’m not sure if that’s a game development thing, because tightly coupled objects are a code smell in most development. It’s probably just my unfamiliarity of any sort of game structures.

Around 3/4 of the way through the game jam, I had a day where I couldn’t make any progress because of other commitments, and that really threw me off. I came back to the game the next day, but my enthusiasm was lower. I was looking at the countdown, thinking that I didn’t really have time to implement most of the bigger things left on my list. A few of the smaller things were easy enough, so I added really terrible rocks that I made in Blender, stuck some badly repeating music in there, added a credits screen, and called it a day.

I’m not over the moon with what I’ve ended up with, but it was a valuable learning experience, and I think I’ll probably do some more game jams in the future if they come up at the right time. It opened my eyes to what can be done in the various engines.