0 Hour Game Jam 2015
Play the game here, directly in your browser (do not try to play it from your phone): http://www.salomonsson.se/0h2015/
Timelapse of my screen of me coding the game here: https://youtu.be/yMiWicn2LnI
The Zero Hour Gamejam happens once a year, when daylight saving makes one hour magically dissapear. If you manage to make a game within that hour you’ll be able to claim that you made a game in 0 hours (or less).
This is the second time I participate, but unfortunately I did not manage to keep within the time limit. In fact I blew the deadline by 30 minutes. That is either “just 30 minutes”, or “50% over my budget”. I’ll choose the latter, to overshoot by that much is not ok! So why did I fail? Here are my thoughts:
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The scope was very ambitious to begin with, with no real way to downscope if time was running short. A better way is to have a much simpler idea and to add features to it, and always have a backup plan. I knew that this was a big risk, but went with it anyway. I hoped that with rigouros planning I would be able to pull it off anyway.
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I had planned all my tasks. I had a story board, knew exactly which drawings and which scripts I needed. I knew it was heavy on the art-side (and managed to keep my sub-deadline for art production), but totally miscalculated the time needed to create all the scenes and place all the assets in the world. This was my biggest failiure!
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When you code in the middle of the night you HAVE TO have some wiggle-room for bugs! You are tired, time is running out, you make mistakes. It’s like gravity. A bug inside the shop cost me something around 10-15 minutes.
So what do I learn from this? Making a game in less than one hour is hard! Estimating how long a programming task will take is hard, but also an essential skill for any developer! Therefore I’ll make sure to practice this more. The One Hour Game Jam runs once a week, and I will try to participate in a couple of those. And of course I’ll post all progress about it here.