1 Game 1 Month: Robo Drop

A friend of mine organised a jam for a few of us to move from talking about making games to actually making games. It's honestly worked a treat, I created a mental image of the game and over the space of a month I made it a reality.

I know there are a lot of people who hate the themes for jams as they always suck, but most of us appear to have been able to come up with something around ours: Fast and Slow (Use both concepts). My idea focused around a little robot whose legs didn't work, so when it hits the ground they can't move; but they have a little jet pack to move around in bursts.

I had to learn a few things to make this work, the first being making some art. I am pretty far from an artist, my main concern here was to avoid programmer art. Online I picked up some free art assets, but they never cover all your needs so they were expanded with the inclusion of animated blocks that pulse and floor tiles converted to look like conveyor belts. The end result appears to work great for the game.

During the jam I did some experimenting with Bosca Ceoil in an attempt to make my own music in the end declaring defeat and finding a downloadable one.

As for the programming, one of my first issues was taking the basic platformer movement and bolting on a jetpack, easy I hear you say its just a big jump. Sure it is but this character can't walk, so when you first hit the ceiling; the logic treated it as the floor and stopped moving. Once I ironed that out (using your direction to decide if you were on or you under the floor tile), I encountered a strange collision bug when the character hit something on its corner they would become stuck in it. To fix this one I handled both axis collisions at once and then update both at the same time.

My take away is if you've thought about making games, make a game. Making a 2d game use gamemaker, 3d use unity. There are a bunch of tutorials out there, google and youtube are your friends. Make clones, get some practice in. Share your games with friends and family, have fun with it.