Bitksel - I joined One Hour Game Jam

This is how it went, or at least how I remember it. It was so hectic this may be out of order but anyway!

One Hour Game Jam is a gamejam where everyone has to make a game, you guessed it, in one hour.

The theme for the jam I joined was "Your favorite game but as simple as possible." So naturally, I recreated Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind in simplest way I could think, meanwhile trying to make it in an hour.

IT WAS STRESSFUL! Super stressful, but so so rewarding when you got something made. I had never done this kind of gamejam before, so I had no idea how stressful would it get. I managed to calm myself down by just thinking that it's just for good fun, so no need to stress about it. Then I got to work.

First, I used Unity speedtree to make some trees. Just quickly whipped up something and moved on. Two kinds of trees were made, dead and normal trees. Dead trees were just normal trees without leaves.

I then proceeded to make a terrain. I didn't try to make it look like Morrowind world map since I didn't have time to think such things, just wanted to make something that vaguely looked like Vvardenfell. Few hills here and there, and tall mountain in middle of it.

For terrain I needed some textures. Instead of using default textures, I opened Pyxel and whipped up few lowres (32x32) textures. Grass, swamp, lava, stone and ash. Then I applied those to the terrain, and proceeded to paint the terrain with trees.

After the terrain was done I added the default Unity FPS character to the scene. I got myself some sound effects for walking on grass, edited them in audacity and replaced the default sound effects.

Under terrain I just added a plane with water material that came with Unity default assets. Didn't think much on that. I had to raise my terrain however and make it a bit different, since I wanted a tiny river go through the terrain.

Since it's Morrowind, it needed tall mushrooms because those are a staple for Morrowind. I made them from Unity's own 3D objects, just a cylinder with a flat sphere on top of it. I covered some areas with those mushrooms, but learned I couldn't use the terrain editor's tree tool for that for some reason.

40 minutes was suddenly gone. I had 20 minutes left.

I proceeded to look for a background music, because that's important for atmosphere, which was my main thing in this game: Make it feel at least a little bit like Morrowind.

This took me ten minutes or so. Finding a good background music, which also has proper license was difficult. But I got lucky and found something from Free Music Archive, thanks to their good search function.

10 minutes left.

I quickly added a cube to the player object, then made it a rectangle, then gave it a shiny metallic material. Then I animated it to swing around a bit, and attached a script that would play that animation whenever player clicked mouse button.

Time for testing! When I moved around and swung my sword, it would fly off a bit, because of coordinates ruining my animation. Just removed those coordinates and tried again. Now the sword worked.

I was around 4 minutes overtime when everything was done. I thought that this is as good as it gets and built the project and put it on my itch.io.

https://akselmo.itch.io/the-simple-books-simplewinds

Give it a try!

My feelings after the whole thing

It was super stressful for me, but it also helped me to think _less. _I had to come up with something, anything and not think about the small things at all. This kind of workflow gave me lots of freedom to do anything and it was really refreshing!

After I got it uploaded on itch.io and the site, I was relieved and happy. I made a game in an hour. Sure I used a lot of Unity's features, but whatever, I'm pleased with myself. If I ever join this next time, I know how it'll be like and how to work with things. I may even try to make something that requires more coding.

All these games are streamed by the 1HGJ people, so it was nice to see my game being played. The guy streaming mentioned that I should've added acrobatics stat and jumping around would've make my character acrobatics skill higher. Great idea, but even if I had thought of that, I wouldn't have had the time to make it. Cutting corners was essential.

All in all, refreshing and pleasant experience. I recommend it to anyone who is into gamedev! It's weekly thing, every saturday and only one hour of your life, so why not? :D