After a year of working on our game, we decided to participate in the UE5 MegaJam this year. The theme was “Antiquated Future”
You can download our game and check it out by CLICKING HERE!
After a quick brainstorming session, we decided to make a gladiator game where ancient Rome never fell. The year was 2000+ and people ran around with sticks and light saber swords!
SMART CHOICES:
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- We made the game SP. Normally we dont make single player games but because we wanted to get something in place that was rather large we knew we needed the time to do so. We did try to make it networked at first, but after we noticed it was taking far too long we simply scratched that and went with 100% SP.
- We kept the feature creep down. I will go into how we failed on this as well, but for the most part we kept it to a minimum.
- Good concept with a well throughout plan for the game premise. Gladiators attend a ring, fight, drop items, you pick them up, fight more fights!!! YEAH!!
- Art style. This art style is one of my favorite and really let me flex my hand painted muscles!
BAD CHOICES:
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- In true fashion, we were making great time and had 18hrs left. Instead of just closing up shop we tried to hammer out a few last minute things. This created a bug in the game that caused building/compiling the game to fail. Luckily, we had the process down to 29 minutes and Mester (the coder) made a quick fix change to see if that would enable the build to go through. With 40min left on the clock and 29 of those stuck on a compile, lets just say the blood was pumping.
- ITCH.io only allows 1gb uploads for your game. I have not participated in a gamejam in some time and forgot this fact. Why did this matter? your game has to be submitted to the link prior to the closeout. I did not realize the 1GB limit until I tried to upload and found there was an error. After a quick trip to GDRIVE, I was able to make it happen. Short version, know how to submit the game before 40m left in the competition!
- Game complexity. So, while we were able to hold back the feature creep I added in unnecessary complexity. With 10+ mobs and each of them requiring a custom data table for what to spawn…. I found myself spending almost 5hrs trying to balance a game that I just ended up saying “TRUCK IT” to and let the loot tables be what they were. This is not ideal and I really need to look into making a DT creation tool for UE5.
All in all we had an amazing time and I think the product speaks for itself. Here are some eye candy screenies to keep you happy! If you play the game, we would love to hear your feedback.
