The Neon Hook - a Lost Relic Games Game Jam entry
I have had a very long pause in making games for game jams and the Lost Relic Games Game Jam 2022 was a great opportunity to jump back into the creativity wagon and just do some coding for pure fun and to challenge myself.
This game jam was special for me because of two reasons:
1. It was hosted by a community I've joined few months ago which became a safe space for me to talk about gamedev and life. I love these guys and I really wanted to do some games with them.
2. This was relatively long game jam (it lasted 9 days). I've participated in much shorter jams (usually 48h) so far. It was really nice to have more time to plan when to jam. In the end I made a game in overall 40 hours, but thanks to the 9 days time span I could plan when to code between my daily job and life and stuff.
The theme of the Jam was:
"Connection"
I made a puzzle game once again. The core idea was that you have to connect platforms using a grappling hook in a way which allow you to get into the exit portal. I made it in a minimalistic style as I'm really poor at graphics, but the side effect of that is that I can run even on less powerful computers.
This was the first time I decided to not go with the "Blueprints Only" approach. I knew I will have to manage positions of multiple platforms and I knew that managing containers of data in Blueprints is a terrible experience. I was scared that writing C++ code will slow down the creation process but my concerns were unfounded. Everything went perfectly fine and I think I will do more coding in future game jams as well.
I designed the game in a way that I won't have to rely on the physics system. Every movement is precalculated, even the hook's trajectory. The only thing that uses physics is the rope component. Thanks to that the game works in a predictive way, which is very important in designing puzzles.
Even though this game didn't get high rates it received a lot of positive comments. I'm very proud of it and I think this is my the most polished game jam entry so far. You can check the submission page and a download button here: https://itch.io/jam/lost-relic-games-1/rate/1580356
After the gamejam has had finished I've published a little dev log (which was made with very low effort and low quality, but this was intentional!).