H-BRS Game Jam

Hello to all of you! As some of you might know two weeks ago the first official H-BRS Game Jam was hosted and of course we decided to participate. We took part in the Jam with a Team of 5, consisting of Michael | Bosdan, one of our Game Designers, Tobi | Cat, our Graphics Lead, David | IKE200, our Programming Lead, Alex | Tarexx and Marvin | Bojarrow, two of our Programmers. The Jam was hosted from the third of August until the sixth of August for a total of 72 hours. As this post includes minor spoilers and details about the game we created for the Jam, you might want to play the game first before continuing to read. You can find our initial submission here and a refined version with additional features here. We would be honored if you could join our Discord and leave us some feedback there. Also, check out the other Submissions and leave them some love.

Day 1

At 10:00 AM the Jam was kicked off in an online call in which the theme of the Jam was revealed to be Light & Shadow. We started by brainstorming and collecting ideas to flesh out the first concept for the game.

With our initial concept of an escape game taking place on an abandoned space station, where the player is equipped with light-generating abilities and must fight shadowy creatures, we had a lot of work to do. We worked 10 hours straight and at the end of the day we had a prototype where the player could already move and shoot, as well as a first concept for the enemies and the setting/mood for the environment:

Day 2

On the second day, we started off by defining the goals for that day and assigning tasks to everyone. Ideas on how to enhance the player’s feeling of being alone in the dark were discussed and added to the ToDo list.

We then went right to work extending the behavior of our enemies, expanding the level, refining the character controls, adding sounds for footsteps and a heartbeat, as well as creating missing models and effects. At the end of the day, we had the first rough version in which you could progress through multiple rooms in the level while fighting against enemies attacking you. Also, the first playtesting of this version took place in the evening, and we received valuable feedback from friends, that we planned to implement the next day.

Day 3

On the third day, our goal was to polish the rough version we had into the finished game. For that, we wanted to add in more sound effects and a voice-over for the story progression. A boss fight in the last room was meant to be the grand finale. Lastly, a menu for adjusting the volume and visual quality was planned to make the game playable on as many different devices as possible.

We also tried to implement as many additional features as possible, which we initially labeled as goodies. So features we would like to have but were not crucial for the core game. This included:

• A splash screen on startup
• Creating a Logo and Icon for the game
• More visual effects like opening your eyes on starting the game
• Having the boss fight outdoors, which was a challenge because of the different lighting settings in- and outdoors
• An end sequence after beating the game including an animated credit roll

And many more small tasks we wrote down over time and crossed off when we implemented them, as well as squashing a lot of bugs:

We ended up working about 19 hours straight at the university and finished around 4:15 AM the next day by uploading the game to Itch.io.

Day 4 and Beyond

On Sunday the jury play tested every submission and gave first feedback to the teams. At this point, we want to shout out to our fellow participants who all submitted awesome games. We were especially impressed by the teams/persons who had little to no prior experience creating games but more than made up for that with creative ideas and dedication.

The next day was the day the winners of the Game Jam were announced. And we can proudly say, that we were able to take first place. It was a really close call, as first and second place were only separated by 0.04 points (first place 7.6625, second place 7.625, maximum possible points 10).

We spent the following week refining the game. Increasing performance, tweaking the lighting, fixing small bugs, and especially adding English localization, as the first version only included German text and audio.

Learnings

We all took away different lessons from this Jam and the following week. Here we will shorty list personal learnings from each developer:

For my part, I learned the most about how to play sounds like sound cues for effects and dialogue audio at specific trigger moments. Also, I learned a lot about how to localize dialogue or assets in general. Also I never polished a game like this. I had a lot of fun just adding insignificant stuff like a splash screen on startup and menus fading in and out. But that made the game feel so much better in my opinion from a quality perspective.
~ David | IKE200

This was the first Game Jam I participated in. I had doubts about how many features and content we could create in 72 hours. But my teammates proved me wrong. Not only did we implement our core game mechanic very early on, we also used features of the Unreal Engine that we had barely touched before just to add all sorts of subtle details to the game. In the end, I was really surprised at what we were able to achieve. So never underestimate what you or others are capable of!
~ Alex | Tarexx

It was also my first Game Jam and I got to love this kind of event. It was so much fun to work on the game with the team in one room, where we interacted with one another the whole time. I also learned a lot about Behavior Trees in Unreal Engine, which is an awesome way to make interesting NPCs that feel actually alive. The Jam was also a good way to learn a lot in a short period of time, which we can use for our main project (“Honu”).
~ Marvin | Bojarrow

For my own part, this Game Jam was a new challenge as creating meshes, materials, and particle effects under time pressure was something I was not used to before. Developing a concept for a weapon or enemy all the way to implementation took a lot out of me, but with the help of my team and a lot of communication and brainstorming, we were able to overcome these hurdles in this very short time frame.
~ Tobi | Cat

My main focus was on level building. In Prism light and darkness are the key to both gameplay and immersion, my primary goal was to find the sweetspot where the player can navigate through the game while still being immersed in the dark atmosphere. Midway through the process, a hurdle arose as a performance dip, flagged by Tobi, our graphics lead, that originated in the influx of dynamic lights. This led to a valuable lesson in performance optimization.
I had a lot of fun, placing sound cues reinforcing the mood we envisioned. Working on a level in such a limited amount of time was new to me and a tough challenge, so I learned to quicken the workflow by learning a few new tricks and getting used to more hotkeys. The team collaborated very well and I am looking forward to the next jam.
~ Michael | Bosdan

Final Thoughts

It was a really good experience for all of us. We learned a lot about Game Development, especially using Unreal, and we grew closer as a team. We hope that this post was of interest to you (which it probably was if you kept reading up to this point). If you want to play either our submitted version or the refined version we created later (or maybe both) you can find them here:

Initial Submission

Final Version

We would be honored if you would give the game a try and tell us what you thought after playing. Leave any thoughts you have either here in the comments, or join our Discord. Also, check out the other Submissions and leave them some love.