Can We Combine 4 Games Into One? | Game Dev Challenge

for the gmtk game gym we tried something a little crazy this time around we were a team of four and we all separately started working on different games and then after a few hours we joined forces to join all of our game ideas together into one a perfect fit because the topic of this year's gmtk game jam was joined together we only had 48 hours to make a complete game from scratch and the clock was ticking we agreed that each of us would work on something for three hours without showing it to the others i made a prototype of an inception-like ball rolling game where you can control a ball with a ball that controls yet another ball monica made some 3d models for a halloween game river made a system for sticking objects together when they touch oh no oh no and yen made a dynamic music system for yet another game idea he had um oh it's 12 already uh so i made a ghost at first oh nice all right all right yeah i made some glue uh this really random stuff i'm nervously anxious and excited about

seeing what jonas made i wanted to make something very simple so i basically just made a marble game where you can roll around but now it gets a little weird so basically you have these four buttons here and with these four buttons you can control the other marble i like the bounce on that screen other marble oh no what was that obviously there oh no what no and the only one that you control directly is oh no so i made a script which causes things to stick together and then i made another script which uh makes it so that things are forced uh to like unstick in certain areas so the red ones are stuck together yeah so when they're in the green area uh they stick together and if i i could just drag this over here then they'll unstick and okay i like it it's going to be interesting to try and

put that together with what uh jonas says and also with what i have okay it's a music system that i made specifically for my game idea which we're not going to use so we have to repurpose the music system for this you have a three wheeled vehicle and you can in the environment in the level get to different parts of the level to get different wheels yeah so jan created a like scoping nightmare it's gonna be fun it's gonna be interesting now the main challenge was to combine all of our ideas into one if that was even possible here's what this makes me think most obvious relationship is that these wheels become uh jonas balls maybe we can make it so that depending on where you go with the first one you wind up controlling a different one i managed to repurpose my button to make sure it can open my door when you press it whoo open woo close then i made sure the

camera can move into a fixed position as well instead of following the player around the others wanted me to make a proper player character so i had to rewrite some stuff to make that work on the plus side it definitely made the game a bit easier to control making the character rotate correctly wasn't too difficult but making the character rotate smoothly that's what kills me every single time it's not rotating correctly just rotate in the correct direction you dumb piece of crap okay now i can sing i just had to restart unity of course we had some collab problems as well or at the very least that's what we thought i need to use blender installed to work with unity i don't have any blender installed this garbage music x come on that's stupid um what i'm showing is um oh wow some of barnacles graphics here nice i love it this is how the game looked like saturday evening so we had about 20 hours left at this point we

still had no clue how our finished game would look like stick around till the end of the video to see our finished game when i tested this for the first time it felt a little unsatisfying that the bridge didn't react at all when you jump on it so that was something i personally really wanted to change not sure if it was the best call to spend some time on that but hey it looks nice then i opened up my game will you snail just to remind all of you that you should really wish listed on steam now my main activity for the second day ended up being doing a ton of level design which in 3d turned out to be quite a bit more time consuming than expected okay so apparently the light they basically changed nothing visually light baking ended up being a little bit of a dead end as well that was just too much for a small game jam project like this one after a while the level started getting quite messy with tons of invisible trigger zones for checkpoints for the camera for respawning i'm sure there are some good solutions for all of that but i just didn't know how to effectively work with that i started grouping everything together into different sections so i could unload the old section whenever you go

into a new section to save some performance i had good intentions but honestly there would have been better things to spend my time on like finishing the level design as quickly as possible oh yeah the faster transitions already make it a lot better but how do you like that [Music] yeah i like that and the thing with that is that it's just so unexpected when you see that the first time it's like yeah i need to get checkpoints working in this section otherwise i'm gonna go crazy with my last video i made a parody of all of the stupid mistakes that can happen during game gems so naturally we wanted to avoid these mistakes this time around which for the most part we actually managed to do we didn't crunch we agreed on a game idea fairly quickly maybe if you can actually find each other then you can get the balls to stick together that you're controlling and just move them as one yes i love that and we were also quite productive and didn't waste too much time why are they poops i'm using the poops as the

character locations but you know how it goes if you manage to avoid mistakes on one end they'll just happen somewhere else mistake one we tried out a bit of a more modular code architecture this time around which felt like the correct call to make in the beginning but turned out very confusing and hard to debug in the end i guess i put something together really quickly and rushed but i think it will work mistake two we ignored some pretty obvious warning signs one early warning sign was when river said we shouldn't stick too many objects together or it might become a bit buggy well that turned out to be true even for just two objects another warning sign was when the others told me my ballgame idea would be very hard to control they were right about that as well so i think if you see problems like this coming from a mile away you should solve them right away instead of 10 minutes before the deadline that would probably be a good idea mistake three the workflow we chose pretty much forced us to overscope because we set

ourselves the constraint to use absolutely everything we made during the initial 3 hours which made it very hard if not impossible to scale the project down to a reasonable 84 hour scope that way we unfortunately ran out of time at the end and didn't manage to fix a bunch of pretty crucial bugs the music is somewhat broken yes somewhat yeah what happened to it it it's it's on the first layer and it doesn't change so how did our finished game look like let's say there were a few comments that describe the final state of our game quite well i'm sorry but it's too buggy i couldn't finish it after 15 minutes and two restarts i got the apple stuck between the tables so the game soft locked the game is not fun or polished it took me a while to figure out where to go besides this nice game so i'm not making fun of these

fair enough i agree happy halloween boo the door head is locked now here's where the first split screen comes in the music changes as well and now i can use the buttons on the ground to control the pumpkin on the right side let's go grab the pumpkin here it is there's a switch over here that opens the door so that's why i need the pumpkin to put that on that switch oh no so actually so far i really like the game so far this is the part that is fairly polished works fairly well the party starts when everybody is together okay awesome let's go it's a halloween party in space we need to find the party where's the party ah not down there and you have to control a different character this time you have to control the slime and the slime is a little harder to control already so slowly ramping up the difficulty there we go this is where the trouble starts because here we have a door a trap door basically where you need to have two things on it in order for it to work you can see the little light lighting up

when going onto the door there are two lights so that means you need two objects on there hopefully players will figure out they can connect to the glue there's the sticky sound river made and now if you go with both together on there this happens and now the problem is if you fall down which can definitely happen the chance of soft locking yourself is very high okay now i managed to soft lock myself i think obviously i'm a pro at this game so i do not soft lock myself here easy peasy no if you well now here we go now here's where the really cool section starts once again you have to control a pumpkin you'll notice how the music changes when you start controlling the pumpkin i really like the wobbly effect when when a new split screen comes in because now inception now the pumpkin has to control the glue and i control the pumpkin with the character so here in the section we made the glue

very slow to make sure the controls aren't too difficult it's still fairly difficult though uh-oh i kind of got the glue stuck on a very small border there maybe with a little more whoosh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i made it i think i'm gonna completely wrap the glue with the pumpkin now there we go oh there's another trapdoor here where you need two objects yeah we made it to the party there's the halloween party one thing i've still taken away from this is that how you make your game matters there are so many different ways to make games you can start with the gameplay you can start with the music you can start with the graphics you can start with the story you can make games alone you can make games on a team you can come up with your own rules you can make games with your hands you can make games with your feet you decide when and how often you ask for feedback you can listen to feedback you can ignore it you decide how to communicate with your

teammates you decide how much planning you do up front you decide where to look for inspiration and you decide what to do next there are so many different ways to make games so don't stick to the same boring workflow every single time how you make your game determines how it will look like before you even get started there are so many options so keep experimenting and keep innovating i want to give a quick shout out to the glacion team as well because it was very fun to join forces with them for this video you can find the links to all of our main projects in the description below another quick shout out to the shelf man for editing this video there's a link to his gamedev channel and novel in the description as well see you next time you