From A to Bee
2 Day game jam that challenged our 6 person team to create a game using the theme “grow”, and implementing a special object “flower” (15th March - 17th march 2024)
From a to Bee Gameplay
Project Brief
Create a game within 2 days. The Game Jam will have a theme and a special object. Your game should be based around the theme, which gets revealed when the jam starts. The special object should be in your game and should play a somewhat important role.
Game Page
Tools
The game
From A to Bee is a colourful, cheerful, and cozy 3D platformer.
Live free in the carefree life of a Bee, exploring gardens, nature, and contributing to the beauty of the planet. Collect pollen and feed the flowers to progress in the game, but be careful! As peaceful as this life can be, there are still dangers around the corner.
Responsibilities
- Develop the game handling functionality within blueprints to record and save player data from each run.
- Develop the user interface within UMG and implement assets provided
- Create pick up and drop off mechanic in order to allow game progression
- Design and develop water fountain and fire hazard blueprints and create VFX using Niagara for each hazard
- Manage GitHub repository and building the game regularly ensuring smooth development for the team
My Role
My role was across different disciplines during this game jam. From managing the project in GitHub, working on game functionality, designing and developing hazards, to creating VFX. This role was heavily technical due to our team only having 2 members proficient in blueprints but this challenged me and allowed me to push myself to learn how Niagara worked and how to implement it effectively.
Development
Over the course of development, we spent all our time in a call to communicate how our tasks were going and quickly get any feedback on our work. I would follow a scrum approach to development and encourage the team to do so as well. When we reached the end of a scrum cycle I would then merge our work together within GitHub and run a quick playtest with the team to get some extra feedback. Completing our project this way proved to be the most effective method within the short time frame.
Opinions and Future Plans
This project was exciting to work on yet very stressful to finish in a couple of days. Working in a bigger team definitely let us stretch out the tasks and accomplish more within a smaller scope. However, even then the ambition got the best of me and the thought of more members seemed like a bigger project. Nonetheless, we completed the project then spent some extra time after the submission fixing any major bugs or issues with the build. In the future, the goal would be to set some clear boundaries as a team to ensure we dont overload ourselves with unnecessary tasks.