Game Jam , reflective blog post

link to our game= Team Alligator

I also need to add it to my Instagram = gamejam_tudublin.instagram

blog post is recommended to be between 1,000-1,500 words in length and organised under the following headings

Introduction – tell a bit about the Game Jam format
Team – who was in your team? What were the roles?
Organisation and planning – how did you approach the project as a team? This is a good place to include links to your brainstorms, treatment, Game Design Document etc.
Process/ Production – What elements were you responsible for? Tell us about your process. What problems did you have? How did you overcome these? You can include code snippets, screen captures etc in this section.
Lessons learned – What are your main takeaways from the experience of participating in the Game Jam? Did you enjoy it? What did you find most rewarding/ challenging?

1 https://miro.com/app/dashboard/ this is our miro board

1. Our game is called CORRE CAIMÁN and it is about a 2D single player and educational game for those who are a2 level Spanish students practicing subjunctive conjugation. The game is about an alligator called Juan who is trapped in a zoo and the student/player must help the crocodile return home by completing maze levels and answering the right conjugated verbs. There is a total of ten levels, and they must avoid bumping into obstacles to return home successfully. The user plays through the mazes with the mouse. Overall, the game is a very fun and creative way to learn grammar.

2. The game jam format of this game was made in a power point presentation so It’s only avai;abe on desktop but student can download the pdf version and read through on their phone if they downloaded the pdf. There is also an MP4 video to watch on how the game is played.

3. Our team is called TEAM ALLIGATOR,

We each had a role on the PowerPoint slide and helped each other, victory and I both focused on layout of the game and Conor and Irene both made the visuals and the questions.

Organization and planning was the biggest part and it took us time since we didn’t organize it first and jumped quickly on making it with a rush and so I made the PowerPoint document and shared it with my teammates college account, that’s day one and we made a group in Messenger to contact each other and call, we started a Miro board Irene shared the Miro board and that’s were our brainstorming came into place. We first got the idea of a crocodile through our team called Alligator and somehow, we made him into a crocodile instead. Irene suggested the crocodile in a zoo idea.

We all agreed to the idea and started adding YouTube links on making a game in PowerPoint.

At first I was thinking we should give unity a try making a 2D game one easy simple steps from YouTube tutorials. I looked up some unity tutorials on making a language 2d educational game but I couldn’t’ find any easy ones or the ones I am looking for. Irene also suggested that if it’s too difficult we should not do it. Conor thought of a website game, but we were also not so sure if we should go along since coding is not our strength and time consuming. Even though I really wanted to try a website game but Victory and I were not really close to coding skills yet. Eventually we all had A story ideas mostly Irene came up with the story and Conor gave her more tips and ideas to make it better.

4. Process/ Production=
When I made the shared PowerPoint we started straight away following some YouTube tutorials on making a game in power point and we were bad at the start and slow.
We only had one page slide to work on as a rough copy of the slide and we didn’t understand how it worked but we eventually got it straight after Victory and I both stated making paths and river grass layout of the game (world) and added some animation movement and made the walls have a purpose when you touch them (hover) over them. While other problems the PowerPoint was glitchy for me and so when we kept adding more slides it kept changing and some animation for obstacles didn’t work even though I did code them to move.
We also had to change many levels because it was too complicated. And difficult.
Conor helped us with developing some levels and added some sounds when you go to the next. Victory added the music I send him.
I animated the nets and the walls while adding layout
Conor first started making the questions and Irene fixed them and made them better.
Eventually I asked Irene to sketch some drawings to have our own game assets.
She made the crocodile drawing and the girl crocodile, and she also added the rainforest background and dotted paths. Irene suggested on messenger to change the maze our original idea had the questions within the maze but she though of a better idea and remove the questions and 4 multianswers in a new slide. So we have more slides. We also thought of having a restart slide on every level, but we removed that because it was too many slides. We have 10 levels and another 10 for a restart makes it 20 which is too much.

By accident I deleted my old PowerPoint with the old idea might ask someone if they have it, or I could go back to my recycle bin and get back my old PowerPoint which I will do now.

Conor’s first question prototype was made in the old version which was changed since Irene knows more about the Spanish language and so she changed the questions a bit more better. but she got the ideas from Conor.

You can see we changed a lot and kept changing till it was perfect.
We also had the old crocodile from google creative commons, but we used Irene’s one instead.
The last day 27 February I decided to export and give it a try to test and see if the game works or not and the levels were too difficult and frustrating since I kept going back from the start of level 1. And we all worked on making the levels easy and it was not organized because some levels who are level before are way harder then level after. I had about 30 tries to make the game playable.
And record the video to beat the game.

Irene also suggested to replace the triangles to Nets which she drew for us on her iPad and we replaced our crocodile image from google to Irene’s sketched crocodile.

Lessons learned = I Learned a lot within these 3 days it was a good opportunity, and I am glad I participated into making it I wouldn’t like to work on my own it was nice meeting new people from different course module and see their point of view it’s like a user persona in a way. It was challenging as some didn’t have time, but they all did fair work or even more.