Another game jam finished and what a roller coaster of a ride it was. 

Most of Friday evening was spent figuring out a game idea for the theme, “mix it up”. Really struggled but after a few hours I settled on a mix of break out and drop block games. Imagine playing both Arkanoid and Columns at the same time. Also spent quite some time on a name that was descriptive and not the same as something else. (Good luck with that!)

One goal with this game jam was to manage the project with git. So finished Friday night with a clean new project that was managed with git and backed up on GitHub. Switched to URP, prototyped a ball and went to bed. 

Saturday started of strong with some basics done like blocks and setting up a game board. Continued with collision between ball and the paddle. Then I hit a roadblock when I tried to set up a grid of blocks with some nice clean code. Wasted a few hours and reverted it to an earlier state. It was a bit of a letdown, but finishing is more important than clean code. 

Changed direction of the board from XZ to XY (in 3D) to make things easier on myself. Spent Saturday evening making a hacky way for a grid of blocks. Up until now most of the work have been spent on the break out part of the game. Since the grid part didn’t work out I finished the evening with some work on the drop block part before bed. 

At the start of Sunday the game was in an almost working shape. Time to make the game look decent with particle effects, colors etc. While play testing I realized that it was hard to understand when a new block would drop so I added a circular timer over the active column. 

The last few hours was spent finishing up the game lifecycle from start to gameplay to game over and back to restart. There was still time for a little bit of polish and scoring. 

Last hour of the jam was spent making builds (WebGL & Windows) and setting up a Itch.io-page.