What Went Wrong
Paper2D Beta
So far, it may seem like using Paper2D was great and everyone should be using it. However, that is far from the truth. The system is rough around the edges and has a lot of weird quirks that have to be worked around. For instance, the paper tile map class cannot have its tile map set in the details panel. Doing so causes the data to be lost upon reopening the editor, let alone launching an actual build. To get around this, I have to set the variable in the construction script of each blueprint that uses the variable, suffice to say, not great. And that’s just one tiny thing, there’s lots of oddities that we had to work around as we made the game.
Enemies & Boss
For a Mario homage, you may have noticed the lack of enemies or, since we’re supposed to be in a place like Bowser’s Castle, a boss of some kind. We actually had one enemy fully made and the boss was in the works, but due to some computer problems, our Enemy Programmer wasn’t able to submit the content to our repository. By the time the seriousness of the problem became apparent to me, it was too late to do much of anything about it, with the submission deadline closing in. Which meant any level segment that relied on them also had to be altered to work without them, and our level unfortunately feels emptier than it was supposed to.
Submission
So, the actual submission. After we had finished our final build of the game, we had maybe less than a minute left to get our game up. So, I frantically made a barebones itch.io page as fast as I could and submitted our file with, this number can still be seen on our GMTK 2023 submission page, 10 seconds to spare. Only to find out, I submitted the wrong file. A lone executable, instead of a zip file. I let my team down, and there wasn’t any way I could fix it. All our work now had to wait a week to even be seen at all, and any hopes of it gaining some notoriety from the amount of people who look at games from the GMTK game jams was crushed.
Conclusion
Obviously, we didn’t get the result we wanted from the game. We put our all into the game, but I think we just had too few people for the time we were allotted. Our character and environmental artists did an amazing job, but their workload ended up being way too much for them to handle in the time we had. Maybe if I had spent more time looking for even more artists things would have looked even better, but of course then things like the main character’s gameplay and the level and level objects would have all fallen behind even more. Maybe I also should have gotten another Enemy Programmer or another Designer to help. I do still think there was a lot to learn from it. I learned about Unreal 5’s Paper2D system, I learned a bit more about making sprite art, and I learned a lot about managing a team with so many different disciplines. Everyone had so many different talents and vocabularies, keeping up with them in conversation was a task itself. It’s not all doom and gloom for the game as well, I submitted the game, along with a stability improvement patch, to the Post Jam "Jam" #7. I want everyone on the team to feel like their work has been appreciated more than anything, so hopefully this new submission will allow our work to attract some more eyes and reactions.
Super Princess Escape
Made for GMTK Game Jam 2023
Postmortem
I’ve waited a whole year to participate in the GMTK yearly game jam, which I unfortunately missed in 2022. This year, I put a lot of effort into trying to make sure I had a full team before the game jam started, trying to avoid a repeat of Banding Together, where I ended up without any art after callouts. I ended up being able to recruit a Main Systems Designer, a Composer, and multiple Artists before the start date, however, some artists ended up unfortunately calling out again, which left me scrambling for the first few hours of the jam trying to fill the vacancies in art, as well as my continued search for a dedicated programmer for enemy AI. After a few hours of frantic discord messages, I finally had my final team of: Main Systems Designer, Composer, Character Artist, Environmental Artist, and Enemy Programmer, with me serving as the Team Lead and Level Designer.
The theme for GMTK Game Jam 2023 was “roles reversed”, and ultimately we came to the decision to make a 2D platformer inspired by Mario, where Princess Peach escapes Bowser’s Castle. Other ideas we had involved playing as the ghosts from Pac-man or being a Gym Leader in Pokemon, but ultimately we decided on a 2D platformer because we were going to use Unreal 5’s Paper2D system, since the artists we found were more experienced in 2D art than 3D, building an entire RPG battle system in 49 hours seemed a little daunting, and we had experimented with the Paper2D system for a 2D platformer before, and have been wanting to use it.
Restrictions
GMTK Game Jam 2023 Theme:​
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All projects had to adhere to the game jam's theme, which this year was "roles reversed".
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What Went Right
Anti-Jump Gameplay
We originally had the game set up more like a classic platformer. I showed this to my family to see what they thought, and they gave me a lot of criticism about the main character playing too similar to regular Mario, and not taking the theme of “roles reversed” as far as we could. After that scathing review, I decided to have us quickly change course on the main character’s gameplay direction. I figured that if jumping was Mario’s main action, then a suitable role reversal would be to give our Princess Peach stand-in something that was the antithesis of that. That’s how it came to be that our main character cannot jump, and instead slowly floats downwards. The main gameplay then began to slot into place with the player having to carefully navigate platforms that changed their elevation and use level objects like updrafts to manage their elevation.
Tilemaps
As part of my theme, I wanted to make enemies based off of odd numbers. I tried to have each enemy interact with both the player and their AI companion in different ways. I also tried to incorporate their general shape into their behavior. The only number who's shape I had trouble with incorporating was 5, which is why I think its area is probably the weakest. I think all of them achieved their goal of having the player and companion work together to beat them.
Balancing Responsibilities
Although part of this could also be considered something that went wrong, I still think it belongs in this section. During this game jam, I had to seriously manage and balance my time between managing other team members and overseeing their deliverables, and ensuring that the level and every level object was made on time. I also ended up having to make some art myself (the sprites that look nowhere as good as the actual illustrations we have from our real artists) for almost all of my level objects. All of these competing responsibilities definitely took a toll on me (on the second night of the jam my whole body ached from being awake so long), but I think if I hadn’t pushed myself so hard, something would have suffered, whether that be the actual level and accompanying objects I had to make, or the team that needed oversight and feedback on their deliverables.