We teamed up with Nicolás Rivero, Hugo Miraballes, Lautaro Bravo, Santiago Bravo and me, most of the members from the Stay Safe! Jam team that made Sense of Unity, for the Brackeys Game Jam 2021.1.

The theme was:

Day: 1/7

The first day we made some ostriches with bouncing heads and a flocking system. They worked almost as a ragdoll and it inmediatly became something really fun to try out.

From there, we started creating enemies/obstacles for them. We made a first version for a turret and a patrolling camera. Also, we gave the ostriches the ability to stuck their heads under the ground in order to hide from the camera and become invisible!

The most challeging thing so far, from my side, it was to make the bouncing head switch from idle to hiding back and forth. Though it was a fun thing to do and with all the tweaking I had to do to the configurable joint I can say I learnt a lot from it!

Day: 2/7

This day we added a lot of polishment and it was an important day because we finished defining the flow of the game. From this day, you could win or lose the level and we were able to start planning how the levels were going to be.

• 

Also, a new enemy, the land mine, was added and the turret was modified to be a laser instead of a bullet. Loads of vfx were added and a placeholder music with a really nice effect for when the ostriches hide.

Alongside with this, Lauta made a load of maps for the levels and Hugo made a bunch of funny animations for the ostriches. Though we weren’t still sure if the game was going to be challenging, we already knew at this point it was a fun toy to play around.

Day: 3/7

This day was a total madness. We started by polishing some mechanics wich didn’t take too much and were pretty easy. Everything looked bright so far. The goal was start with the levels that day.

And we did… We made more than ten levels but it was a real nightmare. Placing the modules one by one to make the level was a huge challenge and, of course, we found a lot of things that we didn’t notice before and now had to be fixed.

The good thing was that most of the whole game levels were done by the end of the day and we were able to test the game as it should be in the final version. Though we had a lot of balancing to do ahead of us.

Day: 4/7

The first half of the day, we finished all the levels and we were ready to try out everyone of them. From there, we made a few polishments, mostly on the enemies. And we got enough feedback for all the levels. A big list of changes was written down in order to make them more fun to play.

From there, we made all the balance changes the levels needed and then started with the bug fixing, polishment and final adjustments.

Our goal, from this day, was to improve the overall experience till the deadline.

Day: 5/7

During the day, I was the only one who took the day off so I focused on the task that I could make alone with the stuff artist did and weren’t already implemented.

Breaking glasses, better security camera feedback, death feedback and more were added during the morning and afternoon. Also, I took some time to improve the balance in general but specially the security cameras.

Later, the whole team showed up we kept polishing things and adding feedback. For example, the fill bar for the security camera. We tried to focus on the most important stuff and separate the nice to have things to only do them if we had remaining time.

Day: 6/7

This day we added sounds, a few bugs were fixed and we added a bunch of details like decals and props around the whole levels

It was a great feeling to have a few days for only polish and making the game feel as we wanted.

Day: 7/7 Release!

This day we added the finishing touches and released the game!

It was a really nice thing to finish the game. We felt like it was a really polished thing and it didn’t feel that much as a game jam game.

3 things that didn’t work out

We believe that the game turned out as good as it could though there were a few things that could have made it into the game but didn’t.

• We first planned to have the ostriches attack together to reinforce the theme of Stronger Together. We didn’t find a way to make it feel good so we removed this feature.
• Having to manually make levels gave us a lot of control over them but, on the other hand, we had to dedicate a day and a half only to set them up. If it wasn’t a week jam this would had been impossible.
• Having more and more ostriches actually made it more difficult to control, so I think we actually felt a bit short when sticking to the theme but we got this idea and we though it was the fun thing to do.

3 things that did work out

We loved many aspects of the game but if I have to point out three they would be:

• The bizarre concept let us a lot of freedom when making the game. With the week long game jam we just tried everything we thought about and the more bizarre it was, the funnier it felt.
• Physics. Having a bunch of physics made the game felt really good. The bouncing heads, the breaking glasses, all these little details gave a great feeling when doing stuff and they were really cheap to do.
• Solid art & sound work. The game felt like one piece at the end. The art felt like it always followed an aligment instead of random assets and the music give that clumsy feeling that worked along with the bouncing heads.

What now?

We decided to leave this game as it is. Maybe in a future we continue or make something with it but the goal was to make this game for the jam and we are happy with the results.

One thing for sure, some of us already said that we are ready for another game jam. Even it was a week long, the process and the result was so satisfying to us that we never felt overwhelmed or with the need of some rest. So expect a another game jam game in the near future 🙂

Where can I play?!

If you want to play the game then your best choice is to download it at itch.io. If not, you can try to play it on browser at Newgrounds but the art is a bit downgraded and it may not work as fluid as desktop version.

Thank you for reading and hope you enjoyed the game!