Crikey, it’s been a hot minute hasn’t it? Let’s talk about this year’s global game jam!

Sosoowge Ninja#

Having not participated in a Global Game Jam for roughly half a decade I decided to dip my toes back in with a few programmer friends. This year’s theme was “mask” which we decided to incorporate as the main character’s mask. Our focus, being coders, was more on the technical end because we were using the jam to test out s&box, a new game engine/platform from Facepunch of Garry’s Mod and Rust fame built on top of Valve’s Source 2 game engine. We decided to try and make a third-person action game.

What Went Right#

1. Intuitive engine architecture#

s&box appears to have been built with the intent of providing a convenient Unity-style C# scripting layer for Source 2 with none of the Unity’s drawbacks and an eye to correct a few of its defects from a scripting perspective. All of us on the team had some experience with Unity and this transferred almost directly over to s&box with only a few notable differences.

2. Hot-reloading#

Holy balls does s&box hot-reload code incredibly fast. Having used Unity in a previous life I was familiar with the speed of their hot-reloading, but s&box truly did smash it out the park in this area. This made our iteration time significantly shorter. It may seem like a tiny detail but I felt it had a huge impact on how much I enjoyed the development experience.

3. Perforce#

We opted to use Perforce as our source control, which marked the first time I’d used Perforce outside of a professional context and I enjoyed it immensely.

What Went Wrong#

1. Technical Setup#

As comes with the territory when trying out new tech there were a few hiccups. Our Visual Studio project generation was a bit wonky at the start because the project file paths were hard-coded to one person’s machine. If we were more familiar with s&box we probably would have known about this problem and taken steps to mitigate it completely. Additionally I was remoting into my hardware that could run the engine from my laptop at the jam site. This was not exactly ideal but it worked well enough.

2. Human Factors#

One of our number succumbed to the flu early in the jam but tried to power through it. A couple of us had commitments which meant our time was somewhat reduced. This meant the final stage of the jam where things were starting to come together was a bit truncated.

3. No final export :(#

As of me posting the game isn’t really playable anywhere. s&box has some licensing restrictions and we never really got our export working in time for submission.

Conclusion#

In my opinion, despite a few hurdles this was probably the most enjoyable game jam experience I’ve had thus far. When I was a student I always felt a disproportionate level of pressure when participating in jams. This is no longer the case!

Big up Stuart and Charlie for making this an incredibly fun jam after my five-year game jam hiatus.