I created a game in 1 hour!

Here's the (very short) demo of the game.

For those who remember, I talked about my affection for game jams in a previous article called "Becoming a better developer by participating in Game Jams".

In it, I even mentioned my preference for physical jams, where everyone gathers in the same room; the problem is, with the current health crisis, this setup isn't feasible today...

So I took part in my first online Game Jam, but not just any one, a "Losers' Game Jam", organized by the same association behind the previous Game Jam I had taken part in: HitBox Makers.

The concept: To fight off end-of-weekend blues, and every Sunday evening from 7pm to 9pm during the lockdown, an online Game Jam, on Discord, during which participants create a game in exactly 60 minutes on a random theme!

The atmosphere is really cool, the community is very supportive and creativity runs wild, so if you want to join in, it's free, and it's right here: https://discord.gg/JNkNRh7UHN

My experience

I admit, I really didn't know what to expect in terms of results, I have a rough idea of my coding speed, but a Game Jam is also about:

• Finding a concept around the theme
• Finding assets
• Designing the game
• Handling interactions (gameplay)
• Inventing a mini scenario
• Creating animations

And all that in 60 minutes, which is soooo short, but personally, I loved it!

Every creator has different strategies, some bet everything on the story and develop very few interactions, while others create a "polished" gameplay but without a story.

Personally, I like to sit right at the border between the two, I'm not trying to keep the player engaged for very long, but I do like to surprise them or make them feel an emotion (even a very basic one).

What I'd recommend to save time (and it's no luxury) is to already have your tools ready, a blank project set up, and a few gameplay ideas that could apply to different themes!

Horny-car: the game

For my part, I knew I wanted to build a web game with VueJS, since it's the technology I'm most efficient with, even though it remains limited for video games.

I also had several concepts in mind, one of which was to make an object talk while pushing the user to interact with it, using only their mouse.

In the end, the theme "used cars" steered me toward this choice, and it was only after developing the first interaction that I got the idea to give it the shape of a car game selection menu, but shh, I won't say any more, here's the demo: https://nicolasbrondin.github.io/horny-car/index.html

The experience is very short, but what I like about the game is that it triggers a little emotion in the player: surprise for some, laughter for others, and maybe a bit of disgust too...

If you want to check out the game's code, it's open-source and available on my Github right below: