back in june, when Inbound Shovel announced they were hosting a beginner friendly gamejam, i decided on a whim i wanted to join just for fun. before this i had never done any sort of gamedev, not even messing around with gamemaker or anything! i reluctantly posted in the discord looking for team not expecting much, and surprisingly got picked up pretty fast. this got me kinda nervous because they all had gamejam experience, i almost wanted to chicken out a few days before the jam lol. despite my nerves, i decided to press on, and i'm glad i did! here i wanna show off some behind the scenes stuff and share my overall experience.

first off, shoutout to all of my team members, they all did a fantastic job and made my first experience with gamedev awesome. check out their stuff!!
CliCli - Programming
Keta O - Programming, 3D Modelling
Aiden Rose Creative - Music

here's how the game came together in just 10 days!

after the theme "just get started" was revealed, we all started brainstorming ideas. the initial idea came pretty quickly, but the scope was initially much larger. it was going to be a roguelike where dreams act as timed dungeons, and you could prep by using items in your room before you sleep. over time we scoped down to a pure platformer instead. it become much more like a speedrunning game, with movement and platforming becoming the main focus. i was inspired by the slide jumps and bunnyhopping you can do in Pseudoregalia, and thought that style of movement could work for this game.

i spent a lot of time in this gamejam learning new stuff! rigging from scratch, 3D animation, level design, and learning how to navigate godot. a lot of this stuff i generally knew how to do but it was cool to put it into practice. it was surpisingly intuitive to learn how godot works, i definitely recommend giving it a shot if you've never done gamedev before! especially if you use blender, implementing stuff on my end was seamless. after the jam i also made a little trailer for the game, which was nice since i hadn't done video editing in a while.

towards the middle of the jam i wanted to come up with some more stuff to give the game more personality/charm. the ui was inspired by games like pizza tower and penny's big breakaway that show the character's expression. also you may notice that most of the assets for the room were yoinked from a different project of mine, hehe.

one of our team members was struggling with making levels, so i was tasked with making levels for the last three days. another thing i had never done before, so it was a lot of trial and error. i ended up spending the entirety of the last day scrambling to get the levels fully playable, place all the pickups, finish the ui assets, and setup the game page

the levels definitely feel like the weakest part of my work, i would have loved to make more textures, decorations, and tweaks but there simply wasn't enough time. at some point i'd like to go back and add these things.

overall, i had a lot of fun working on a game for the first time! definitely a lot less intimidating than i imagined, especially with such good team members. will definitely be open to working on more games in the future! you can play the game for free by clicking here or the download button above.