Post mortem Youm way.

Following Piroporopi's post mortem, I'm adding my contributions:

It was really interesting and motivating to work on this project.

A concept that wasn't easy to come by:

Giving ideas, references and thinking about building something interesting was not an easy exercise, but in the end, with a method finding a common idea was pretty cool!

Timeline:

My timeline during the jam:

• Day 1: Concept, configuration of Unreal and github projects.
• Day 2-3: Animation (blender), music
• Day 4:  AnimBlueprint.
• Days 5-7: Level Design, GamePlay Tweak, Music, Compilation.

Learning Unreal:

I've spent a bit of time the last 8 months in Unreal, but not for gaming, which has helped a lot. Learning by watching lots of tutorials was the best way to get started. Plus, working with Unreal is always intimidating for me.

Jams are really the best way to force us to learn, to try and find a solution, whether it's good or bad, you have to solve the problem as quickly as possible. You share a goal that is time limited. It's a really good and enjoyable experience. 

Creating a game:

I don't have much experience in creating games, and at first it wasn't difficult to assess which task to do,but define how much time you could devote to it in a week, was more difficult. 

The time spent animating the character was too long, and in the manner of an “animation studio animator” and not in the right way for a platform game. So I spent even more time adapting them to a platform game's need for rapid reaction.

For the level design, it was difficult to understand what was wrong at first, so we spent a lot of time exchanging platform game references, and I spent even more time looking at them to understand why at first it was really frustrating and stressful for the player.

Of course, in the end, the result is far from perfect, but it's acceptable and, I hope, not (less) stressful. I understand that the process still requires a lot of time to test and refine each element!

I was really interested to try dynamic music. But i was a bit too much work. Creating music in a DAW and break it in layer, creating a logic to trigger all elements inside of Unreal was to long, and at the end there is nore or less, no music, and sadly no sound fx too...

But the overall experience and the state at the end of the jam give us real motivation to correct the problems and offer players a real experience.

Here's my to-do list for next month?

• Music and sound fx !
• Adjust Level Design
• Clean animBlueprint and odd animations
• Player controler Tweak

Let's go!