Game Jam
Image from our game.
Introduction
This weekend a number of students from different TU Dublin campuses participated in the game jam. The game jam is an event which takes place online over the course of a whole weekend where a number of students from different campuses are put in a group and must create a game together. The brief we were given was to make a game where you can learn a different language. Our language was French.
The Team
My team consisted of me, Dominika Skrzat another student from my course, Allison O' Donovan and Finn Burke Power, two students from TU Dublin Aungier Street who are studying business and language. These students are studying French and I have never met them before. Myself and Dominikas role was to design the game while Allison and Finns roles were to put together a few French questions for the game.
Organisation And Planning
A French student and German student were accidentally put on my team at the beginning but because they were two students from separate language courses they couldn't be on my team because we could have one language so we got off to a bit of a messy start however once we got this fixed things took a turn for the better. We originally went with the idea for a pen and paper card game just to quicken up the process however we realised that would just look like we made no effort so we decided to do it digitally. We looked up card game templates online but struggled to find a good one. We decided to avoid Unity as the other two students had never used it and it can be very hard to use so we reckoned we wouldn't get it done in time. In the end we went with Roblox as Dominika has had lots of experience using Roblox so that was one app that somebody knew how how to use.
Link to Miro board where we brainstormed ideas.
Process/Production
So after hours of brainstorming we settled on using Roblox to make our game. We each had to create a Roblox account and let Dominika add us to her game so we could all work together. For our game we had three different categories and difficulties. The categories were food-easy, family-advanced and sports-hard. The objective was for your player to jump over a certain number of platforms until they reached the main platform with four doors and a question above these doors. The answers were written on the doors and the player had to walk through the door with the correct answer. If the player walked into the door with the wrong answer they lost the game. Since I'm not very good with game design I helped Dominika with creating the world and adding in the characters. Dominika made the game playable while Allison and Finn gathered French questions together to include in the game. One problem we had throughout the weekend was finding the time to get everyone to meet up although we did meet up whenever we could and when we couldn't we just gave each other tasks to do in the meantime so they'd be done for when we were able to meet up.
Lessons Learned
Although this was a very stressful weekend I have to say I did learn plenty of lessons. I learned that when you are working in a group communication is very important otherwise each person won't know what they're supposed to do and whether they're doing things right. I also learned that game design can be pretty enjoyable and that I quite enjoy Roblox. I also learned to never cram an assignment right before it's due. Obviously this weekend was different as we only had three days to do the game however that added to the stress knowing we had so little time so obviously you should never do that with assignments. I did enjoy bits and pieces of this weekend however it is good to finally have it over with. I enjoyed creating the game using Roblox and working with the people I worked with however I didn't enjoy the long days and staring at a screen basically all day Friday and I might have actually preferred this to be in person.
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