Global Game Jam 2018

Hey, I finally got around to making a game again!

After finishing my internship at Fluffy Fairy Games last April I did not write a single line of code for a game until this January. Realizing how boring programming games can be if done everyday together with lots of struggles starting to study for university again drained every motivation from me for a few months.

But last semester I took a lab course that teaches OpenGL and started creating a game as a freestyle assignment at the beginning of this month. The next blog post will probably be about that. Now at the end of January the Global Game Jam time came around and I had enough motivation to go there.

Together with four awesome team-members we created a small sound-wave-reflecting puzzle game. Of couse we didn’t really finished our game. As with every game jam game, there could be more and better levels and the mechanics could be more refined. But it is playable. And that is quite an accomplishment.

It’s the fourth time I took part in a Global Game Jam and every time I used a different technology. This year we used the Godot Engine. Most of us had no experience with this at all, so the first day was a little bit frustrating with little progress. For me Godot did not crash as often as Unity, but still with an increasing rate over the weekend. I’m probably just a big pile of shit and game engine crashes are the flies that are attracted to me.

So at the end I met some new great people and some I already knew. I learned a lot about a new engine and why I will probably never use it again. I even got enough sleep every day and didn’t feel completely exhausted at the last day. So summed up a great Global Game Jam experience. I’m looking forward to next year.