Night At The Mill

Overview

Six of us entered a Spanish week-long game jam, and the theme was nature and sustainability. The first two days were spent on the design of the game; we came up with a horror, weeping-angel-infected lumber mill, where you have to collect acorn seeds to grow and chop trees to keep furnaces burning and lights powered.

This was our smoothest game jam by far, credited to a thorough design, clear task management, and comprehensive understanding of source control - though, that's not to say we didn't put the hours and sweat in.

Results

Itch page

The community-rated us 24th out of 62 submissions.

ICGJ (International Conference for Game Jams) Presentation.

We were selected to do a 3-minute presentation + Q&A for ICGJ so we could give our insights and help others.

Reflection

Things that went well

First time source control worked. I was the project manager and lead programmer.

This was the first game jam in which our source control went well and didn't break; Last time, it was a mess. Since then, I took the time to learn about source control - mainly the basics - and I also completed a year-long Internship where I got really comfortable with git.

Oddly enough, my internship exposed me to project management and lead programmer roles, so I was well equipped for this game jam; I ended up creating and delegating tasks in a Kanban board, and being a source control dictator. Unfortunately, our two other programmers ended up not having much time to help, so I took up the mantle and coded the core mechanics; fortunately, I'm a quick developer.

Things I'm going to improve

A minor problem we had was a messy folder structure. I tried to follow a structure I found online by creating empty folders in the project, but it ended up being disorganized - partly because my teammates weren't used to a structure, and partly because I couldn't push empty folders to GitHub. I've since researched how to push an empty directory and found that you can add a .gitkeep file to the directory to make git push it. I even made a project template structure with .gitkeeps files in and uploaded it to my Google Drive for later use and sharing.

Another problem I faced was having references to a deleted map; I've experienced this multiple times. What happens is, after deleting an asset, it still exists in file explorer, and is still being referenced by something, and you only find out when you get packaging warnings. I still don't know the reason for this, but I really want to find out because I find it important to be able to resolve Unreal issues and hiccups.