Hello, everyone! This will be a post-mortem for Sense of Unity.

This game was made for the Stay Safe! Jam. A Jam made during the world pandemic originated by the COVID-19. The goal of the jam organizers was, in their words, “The Stay Safe! Jam is about staying at home and being creative. In these days of the Corona crisis, everyone can do their part to improve the situation. The most important thing is to stay at home so the spread of the virus can slow down. Why not develop a game?”

Development

At first, I found a game jam I wanted to participate and I decided to invite a bunch of friends to it: Andrea Alonso, Lautaro Bravo, Kevin Miles, Hugo Miraballes, Nicolás Rivero, Martín Martelletti & Santiago Bravo (the last one was invited by his brother Lautaro). These were a lot of people and it was a risky move for a 48hs game jam but we wanted to try it out and all of us had experience working on videogames (except for the musician).
When the jam started the topic of the jam was Solidarity so we played around with a lot of ideas where the player had to help other people. Given the global situation, we guessed that everyone was going to go for the “COVID-19” theme so we tried to escape from it. Instead, we aimed to go for a Plague Doctor that is trying to help to escape some random guys.

So one of the things we worked on was a system were the characters would hold their hands to the plague doctor while he moved through the levels. The game would be something similar to a Sokoban with the classic Snake game. The most difficult part was the need of making enough levels with interesting puzzles ideas.
Sadly, after 12hs of jam Martín, one of the teammates that were going to make levels, decided he wouldn’t continue. At that moment, luckily this time, Alan came to help us and worked on the code letting Lautaro work on the level design with Kevin.
Without any other delay, I think we reached the goal to make the game in time. I think the most difficult thing that I would change would be the screen of death (it takes a lot of unnecessary time) and that some characters aren’t too visible for the player. Of course, in a game jam, it was very difficult to see this before.
Also, once more we used matrixes for a game jam game. Kudos to that approach because it always gives us huge flexibility when making levels!

Reception

One great thing was that we received cool videos from some YouTubers that tried out the game. One even said it was the best of the day and in a later video the best one of the week.

Having that kind of reception gave it a bonus feel. Every time someone takes the time to express positive about your game, even for a small text review, it feels like a great reward.
Sadly, it looks like we will never know who the game jam winner was. Even it wasn’t the goal of the jam itself, it would have been nice to have a review from the “judges” but one day, after loads of weeks, they said they were going to post the reviews during the week and so far we have no news. I think people at the Discord channel may be waiting for something that will never happen.

Roque’s Life

As I had been saying in, for example in my last sunday devlog post or on Twitter, we decided to try to make a complete game from it. The game so far has the codename of Roque’s Life.

Right now my biggest fear is that we don’t finish it because I think it has potential. But, I understand all of the team members aren’t full time developers to this game and it might be a big thing to bite. Hopefully, we can come out with something good from this!

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading!