It’s been a while to post news, so why not talk about my game jam entry.

The title card of the 2021 game

I took the lessons learned from last year and tried to improve upon them. Mainly I reduced my scope heavily - turns out, complex AI might not be the best idea to do in 48 hours. Anyway, this time I kept it simple: the player is responsible for keeping a train together. The train moves continously, and you can only change its speed by adding more parts, which also makes it more vulnerable.

The main idea was to create frantic or chaotic gameplay, where you try to keep adding parts towards the train while enemies destroy parts of it. In my opinion, making a high score based game is usually a great idea for a short game jam like this, since it doesn’t require complex level building or story making.

Like last year, I followed some basic rules:

  • Keep the scope simple. Think about the scope beforehand.
  • Write down some basic concept first.
  • When nearing the end, make a list for prioritization.

The last point is especially important. I might have easily lost focus instead of working on the core of the game. Another graphic is nice, but not as important as a working gameplay loop.

That said, there definitely are opportunities for improvement. I even think my scope was still slightly too large. Instead of programming a finicky attachment system, I should have kept it all wagons only. This is also noticable in the criticism I have received so far. The more advanced attachment system comes at the cost of simplicity (and user experience). I barely could use it anyway because of time constraints.

You can check out the game at https://kadokta.itch.io/chaos-train

More to come. Work on SCIM is still ongoing. Hey, at least I managed to write a post before Chris Taylor!

Take care.