This past weekend I participated in the Global Game Jam with Chris Logsdon and Paul Ouellette. The theme was “heartbeat”, so we made a stealth game called “Must’ve been rats!” in which you have to search for a briefcase containing a beating heart so you can escape in a heart-powered elevator.

Download here!

Overall I’m pretty satisfied with the way this jam turned out. We had a lot of fun designing the gameplay and systems, and the game is feature complete despite having only one level at the moment. Even after testing and debugging for 48 hours straight I still enjoy playing the game, which feels like an accomplishment of its own. Still, it’s not a game jam if you don’t make some stupid mistakes and learn a few things, so here are my Things That Went Right and Wrong.

What went right

Flashpunk

At this point I can’t imagine using anything but Flashpunk for my game jam needs. Paul was able to pick it up fairly quickly, despite the fact that he hadn’t used it at all until a few days before the jam. Chris and I have used it a number of times, and even so we both found new features that we’d never known about. The API feels complete and intuitive, and it seems like there’s a function or class for everything we could ever need.

Systemic design with message passing

We designed our base engine as a set of systems that communicated with each other indirectly through message broadcasting, instead of directly through function calls. This allowed us to focus on programming the rules of the game world instead of specific interactions between different entity types. Even though getting each system working correctly was a challenge, adding new rules and rule responses is quite simple.

Data-driven workflow

We did all of our level design using Ogmo Editor, and as usual it served us well. Since we used a tileset for our levels’ art and a grid for collision and pathfinding, I modified my OgmoWorld utility classes to automatically import each of these types automatically and take advantage of FLAKit‘s live reloading capabilities. These changes will be included when I get around to officially releasing OgmoWorld.

What went wrong

Systemic design with message passing

Yeah, I know this one is in both groups. That’s deliberate.

Despite the fact that message passing is really cool and allows for some interesting emergent interactions, it’s not a good fit for everything. One example of a poor application is updating each enemy with the player’s position. My solution was to broadcast a message that told the player to report back with his position. This was slower and less elegant than searching the world for the player instance, and I wish I had realized that sticking rigidly to message passing was a bad approach.

Preconceived ideas

Chris and I had decided we wanted to make a stealth game before the jam started. Even though we didn’t do any kind of brainstorming beforehand, that decision still limited our ability to be creative with our interpretation of the theme. Fortunately we still managed to stay in scope and get the game to feature-complete, but I still wish we had come into the jam without any plans.

Overall, I’d call this Game jam another success. Make sure you play the game!