Working on ‘Broken Seal’ for Global Game Jam 2022

I joined a team of five to work remotely on a game for the 48h Global Game Jam. How did it go and what was the experience like?

‘Broken Seal’ title screen.

The game is available to play on itch.io.

What I did

• Participated in the team ideation using a virtual whiteboard on Miro.
• Set up our code repository on GitHub.
• Wrote code as the team’s second programmer, focusing specifically on:
  • Behaviour of invididual prefabs: the fish, monsters, cracks/holes in ice
  • Implementing audio
  • Trigerring animation on the HUD
• Created the final title screen composition and layout
• Composed two pieces of music for the game
• Created and uploaded the WebGL build.

We used Unity Engine 2021.2.

Result

107 commits from five people, and a playable, if slightly untuned and unfinished, game!

The gist of our concept from the team whiteboard. Two players help each other in a basic game loop.

It is a cliche at this point, but the last few hours have been a rush. To the point when my build was finished merely two minutes before the submission deadline. WebGL builds in Unity, even for small games, can take a notoriously long time and I have yet again underestimated that.

We even had a moment of triumph after I declared ‘it’s live!’, followed by disappointment as I saw an error message about a missing ‘index.html’ file, promptly followed by reassurance that the game is, after all, playable, and the error was… an error. A real rollercoaster of emotion.

Unfortunately, we were unable to properly playtest and tune the game – which means there are glaring issues that affect the experience.

• The scaling of the player models compared to the ice cracks, holes, and light shafts, was not tuned at all and feels awkward.
• Holes disappear too quickly, making it difficult for the players to figure out that the lower seal is supposed to help the upper seal by passing fish through the holes.
• The benefit from sharing fish is unclear – it was supposed to help the upper seal move faster, but the change is too subtle, and the upper seal starts off moving fast already.
• Monsters don’t chase the lower player effectively, so there is no risk in remaining stationary.
• Certain sounds our wrong or missing, which can create misleading feedback for the player.

What the team agreed upon however, is that we managed to create a solid atmosphere, which was helped by the team’s work on the aurora borealis shader used for the background, the seal modelling and animation, the level lighting, and the music.

Screenshots

Reflection

• We took a long time deciding on a concept. By the time we discussed it enough to be able to start work, we took 5 hours on Friday, and even then, we continued discussing the next morning.
  • Could this have been caused by the fact we had five people on the team, all involved in initial ideation? Pitching, discussing and comparing the different concepts certainly contributed to that time.
  • I asked other jammers – got responses such as:
    • 30 minutes for 3 people, heard the theme the day prior to the jam.
    • 4-5 hours for 1 person prior to the start of the jam who had an idea already.
  • I am still working on the research question behind my final MA project, and was considering looking into the effect of constraints on the speed and length of game development. So this ‘team size’ component may have some relevance to my studies (I recall reading in the Wisdom of Teams that high-performing teams tend to have few members) (Katzenbach and Smith 2015).

KATZENBACH, Jon R and Douglas K SMITH. 2015. The Wisdom of Teams : Creating the High-Performance Organization. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.