NoBody
A 4-day game jam project Made on Unreal Engine 4.27 on itch.io, where you use your lives as ammo in an endless shooter game. Will you be able to Survive?
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My Role:
On "NoBody", I worked as the gameplay designer, and programmer and managed and set up some portions of the project for example, source control
(Hover to watch video)
01
Achieved target gameplay pacing
One of the many challenges we had was the pacing of the game. Initially, we made a gameplay loop that was slower and less reaction-focused. However, with the changes in gameplay focus, we had to adapt the gameplay in order to make it faster and more reaction-based. Overall the results were pretty satisfactory.
Postmortem
What Went Right
02
Atmosphere
We managed to achieve the intended atmosphere with the utilization of color and post-processing effects. After a lot of trial and error, we managed to achieve a combination of colors and effects that give the player a sensation of mystery and urgency.
03
Time efficience
With only four days to make a game, we had to optimize our time to the max. During the production of the project, we had to restart the entire gameplay loop due to many different issues, but we still managed to redo everything from scratch without going through a lot of crunch.
04
Blueprint organization
One part that I am especially proud of in this project is how well the blueprint code is organized. Everything in the code has aligned nodes and is commented. Moreover, there are multiple custom functions and components that are utilized in many different portions of the code.
05
Source Control
We utilized GitHub with GitLFS as source control. During the production of the project, we only had trouble with it once, when we filled up our storage budget on LFS but we quickly managed to fix the problem.
What Went Wrong
(Hover to watch video)
01
Change in gameplay direction
2 days after we started the project, we decided to change the game loop from a puzzle game with "gravity-gun inspired mechanics" to an endless shooter. That happened due to a bug with the ragdolls and issues with the puzzles in the level, but in the end, we managed to change the entire gameplay loop and make a full game.
02
No audio-related team members
Unlike the project "Save Her" our teammate responsible for music and audio was not available for this project, which made it considerably more difficult to work with this portion of the game
03
Problems with itch.io page
At one point the NoBody files were removed on the Itch.io page, but after talking with the people responsible for the Game Jam, we managed to put the game back on the website
04
Lack of time
Due to the 4 day deadline and the change in direction we had little time to work on the entirety of the project. Even though we managed to finish all with little crunch, I would still like to see what we could do if we had more time.
05
Performance issues
Due to the lack of time, we didn't do as many performance revisions to the game as we'd like. Even though the game is playable and tends to maintain an acceptable framerate, some players had issues playing it on older hardware.
Conclusion
This was an important experience, I learned a lot about scope due to the low amount of time we had for this project. I have to admit that I was a little sad not to use the puzzle mechanic I worked so hard on. However, the end result is a fully functional and fun game. Other than that it was really fun working with my teammates in this project