Making a christmas game in one month for game jam
A christmas mech soldier game
Game jams and hackathons are a great way of learning new things and socialising with other developers. Recently, GitHub launched their GameOff jam, and our team decided to take on the challenge of creating a complete game in just one month.
The Beginning
The 2021 theme was “bug” - which could mean anything from insects to software glitches, or even rivers (like the Bug River in Poland and Slovakia). We went with a straightforward interpretation: a mech soldier fighting giant bugs to save Christmas. We chose Unity for development with a 3D perspective.
Our initial team consisted of three people, but the very next day two more joined us, bringing our total to five. Since I wasn’t sure if everyone wanted to be mentioned individually, we decided to include full credits in the final game instead.
Early Development
Within the first few days, we had created models for our first two enemies - an ant and a bee - along with basic environmental elements like trees, presents, sugarcane, and snowmen. We even composed our first version of music based on a popular Christmas song. Most importantly, we implemented smooth camera controls, basic player and enemy controllers, making the game playable from the very beginning, even if it wasn’t perfect yet.
You can see our early progress here:
And here’s our repository where you can follow along:
Adding Polish
A few days later, we added new music and sound effects for weapons, making the game much more dynamic. We encountered a small issue with animating the baseball bat due to incorrect rigidbody setup, but thankfully a friend helped us solve the problem. Now players could smash bugs by swinging the bat!
Our next focus was on creating the initial arena and adding a proper mesh for the character. Here’s how the game looked at that stage:
Total Destruction
In the following weeks, we added so much more to the game! Visual effects were implemented, character animations were improved, new monsters were added, and we made significant map tweaks. To add some festive chaos, we introduced Santa Claus flying over the map, throwing gifts containing weapons to players.
The Final Result
After one month of after-hours development, we completed our game for the GameOff 2021 jam organised by Microsoft and GitHub. It was an incredible learning experience and a testament to what a small team can achieve with dedication and the right tools.
Here are the final results:
The complete code repository is available here: View the project on GitHub
This post was originally published on Dev.to