Utah Valley JavaScript Game Design Group

This was our second opportunity to work on interstice! The goal of this jam was to learn some on the new features and changes with Phaser 3 and to start working on a boss type monster for the game.

Play Interstice on Itch.io

Here was our retrospective from that day:

What we can do better:

• Using Windows was very painful / impossible
• Started out VERY warm in the room (got better later)
• Information about current/upcoming event NOT on website
• Phaser 3 has issues and learning curve
• The game is a more complex game than a jam allows for

What went well:

• New people in attendance
• Clean merges (No conflicts)
• The game functioned in codeanywhere.com
• Phaser 3 has a better keyboard interface
• The game had a lot of effort already put into it
• Plenty of directions to work on the game
• Simple components that everyone could contribute from any skill level
• Food was nice
• Good collaboration between participants
• Nice to work in Phaser 3
• Travis was WELL-PREPARED for us to dive right in
• Implementation was very team-oriented
• Fantastic to have Graphics contributors
• Incredible collaboration between assets and code logic during creation

Hex-A-Gone is part hex based matching game and part side scrolling autonomous dungeon crawler. Our focus was on the hex based matching game part that will allow for collection of resources for the eventual crafting mechanic of the game.

Here was our retrospective from that day:

What we can do better:

• Pizza never got ordered. So need to make doubly sure that happens the day of the event.
• The task list was minimal initially so we had to spend extra time coming up with what to work on. Encourage each Project Owner coming in to prepare at least a design doc about their project.
• We could always have more abstraction on separate objects earlier on in development to help avoid everyone working on the same file all day 🙂

What went well:

• New location is still really nice. Thank you Utah Open Source!
• We had all returning attendees, ramp up time was fast!
• The game was well-prepared ahead of time.
• Great collaboration between team members.
• We had higher level architecture in mind during the process

This was our second time working on Word Breaker and our first experience working on a project that we had worked on in a past game jam.

Here was our retrospective from that day:

What we can do better:

• Phaser Tutorial or overview of our framework at each event.
• Highlight participant preparation prior to an event better.
• Encourage all day attendance of the event as much as reasonably possible. Some attendees only could be there part of the day.

What went well:

• New location was really nice. Thank you Utah Open Source!
• Plenty of snacks (arguably too many)
• It was fun to work on an existing project. However, understanding existing code is a lot harder than writing new code.

Past Events:

Word Breaker – Nov. 2, 2016

Gem Cart Dash is a Minecart Infinite Runner. You control your Minecart as it is traveling along a, sometimes broken, rail system. While trying to collect gems as you go you also must avoid obstacles until you have enough you can spawn a portal to complete the level.

Here was our retrospective from that day:

What we can do better:

• Update the website with some kind of information about what to do to prepare for your first event.
• Somehow we need to distribute the git repository ahead of time.

What went well:

• Snacks were great.
• Nate made a great design doc.
• Base game mechanic before the event.
• A/C was working better than last time.
• Pizza showed up on time.
• Scaffolding was greatly improved.

Abnor is a Collectible Monster Battle Simulation. A player starts off with a basic monster, can battle other monsters and collect them if they are defeated. Combat is turn based with the player choosing monster abilities. The combat interface is driven by a simple button menu at the bottom of the screen. We spent more time, than other game jams, on under-the-hood mechanics and stats for the game this time around.

A new phaser game chassis was tested out as well this time which, sadly, presented some additional challenges that slowed our progress. Challenges such as a new dev / build process using webpack and babel (for ES6) instead of gulp / node / ES5. However, we learned a lot of cool things about ES6 as a result. And the distributable packaging of the app using webpack is rather slick.

We also set aside some time at the end for a little more formal scrum retrospective ceremony this time and here were the observations attendees made about this game jam session:

What we can do better:

• Improve on-boarding time to get going on the project that day.
• Air conditioning would be nice. It is turned off on Saturdays.
• Help the Lead Designer for that day understand scope of the work that can potentially be done.
• Help encourage the Lead Designer to better plan the game out ahead of time.
• Get lunch on time.
• Improve scaffolding structure (i.e. have working Unit testing and Makefile)

What went well:

• Having a game scaffolding helped. Prior to this jam we always built it or copy pasta’d from another project.
• Lot’s of great learning such as Phaser and ES6.
• Lead Designer got what he wanted out of the day!
• Good collaboration among the group.
• It was great to see some first timers there!

In RPGFun we are focused on creating an action adventure RPG where you have an overworld, dungeons and map transitions. We used the code base from Multi-Player as our starting point and so we had some multiplayer capabilities added in there as well. A lot of work was spent on expanding tilemaps in Phaser to support features we were designing in Tiled such as having all maps in one master file and having invisible portals that, when the player driven character collides with them, switches the player to a different map. We created some NPC’s that walk around the screen and we played more with sprite animations for Player and NPC movements.

The goal of Multi-Player was to do as the name suggests, create a multiplayer game. We decided on a simple capture the flag game. Some of use were building the game client using Phaser while others were working on the multiplayer server using Node and Eureca.io. We also played with tilemaps for the first time and used a really cool free 2D map editor called Tiled to build our maps. We also played with Sprite Animation and had our little alien friend looking like he was walking around the map.

Interstice was our first foray into the space shooter genre. It also is target towards PC gaming instead of mobile. The idea behind interstice is that it is to be a top down space shooter with lite RPG elements of a monster hunting type variety. Meaning you fly out on missions, kill off easy minions, find and hunt the main boss monster. Finally you can use their parts to upgrade your ship. We made it so there is an interface, a minion that follows you around and your player ship. We also played with sound in this one and have the player ship making thruster sounds as it moves.

For Word Breaker our target platform is mobile devices. It is an puzzle game described as a cross between Boggle® and Tetris®. During the jam we again setup firebase as our data store and setup user login to be authenticated from firebase. From the title screen, you can play the game or go to the store page which we didn’t make it to designing that day. Playing the game is a matter of choosing word combinations from the board. It compares to a word list we load in and if it is a valid word it is removed and your score increases. New letters appear when you clear out a word.