GMTK game jam gathers thousands of game developers each year to make the best game they can in just 48hours. This year, participants had up to 4 days. Ivan, our CEO, participated as a solo dev and made a game that successfully reached top 100 games!
Jam's theme this year is "Built to Scale" and Ivan did a trippy, mind-bending, 3D puzzle platformer called "Tongue Out!" where you need to scale up(or down) the platforms to scale down the totem (your exit) and escape the enchanted Aztec forest. There are 5 levels in total, you can try it for free on this itch.io link. If you liked it, give it some stars. Voting is closing on Sunday (26th).
It all started with white boarding as you can see on the image above. If you don't have a whiteboard at home, you can use Lucid. Ivan avoids designing on paper, he says it "constricts him in a most ridiculous way possible", whatever that means.
On game jam, it's always the best to start with rough level design/outlines and ideas as quickly as possible. On the screenshot above you can see how the level 1 originally looked like.
At later stages, you can define the art direction, props, vibe, etc. Original outline / layout and game mechanics should always be the proper core of the project. Keep that in mind at all times. Don't get so lost in the art stuff that you break the core purpose (intention) of the game itself.
Art should serve the form of the game, not vice-versa!
On average, you can "make up" for the bad art with the good mechanics/game loop, but you can't make up for the bad core mechanics with good art/vibe
Level1- the production version
The same process was used for designing the other 4 levels of the game.
Now that he had levels he had to create tasks to proeprly manage time and organize work. For that, we recommnd using Linear is crazy good for task managemnt in game dev.
Ivan quickly setup the board and created the most important labels - Art, Bug, Dev and Playtest
Altough you could use whiteboard for this too, it's better to use Lucid. It's also good for adding art-direction inspos and much more!
Models (FBX) are exported in blender and then imported into Unity. This workflow works on our non-game-jam projects too.
🏆 Currently Ivan's game is in the top 100 GMTK 2024 game jam games out of 7660 total submissions! And it is in top 50 in the windows category!
⚠️ Please play the windows build as it doesn't have any issues that web version has. Unity's web gl build is still not perfect...
🏆🏆🏆 If you like the game, you can vote for it by clicking HERE 🏆🏆🏆
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