Over the past week, I've participated in the Falling Block Jam. The optional theme was Analog Memory, but in the case of our game, we disregarded it.

This game was built as a team! Mike DeBisco on graphics, Kid Internet on music, Tia Via doing voice overs, and ZBRH doing additional graphics work. I ended up doing all the programming and assisting with graphics when needed.

I'm only going to speak about my own experience here, but this game definitely wouldn't exist without the work of everyone else on the team!

Maybe a month before things kicked off, we did some very rough planning on what we wanted to accomplish during the jam. We pulled in a lot of inspiration from games like Tetris Attack, Puyo Puyo, and similar games. A lot of this brainstorming got dumped into a design document for use to stew on for a while. I went off to make Cookie Flicker in a different jam.

Mike thought of the idea of ice cream falling and came up with the great title Ice Careen. After that, we were pretty locked in on what we wanted to do and we just needed to wait for the jam to start.

Starting out, I needed to make the game grid. I had never made a falling block puzzle game like this before, but I was able to reuse some of the code I made for Raise the Dead for Fun and Profit. Even though Raise the Dead was made in Unity and I have since moved to Godot, it was pretty easy to translate the code base over to manage generating a grid of tiles and control moving objects along it.

The next thing I do is make the routing from the start screen to main menu to game to main menu again. This is kind of boring work, but getting all that locked in early helps so much later on in the jam and you have more important things to do. Managing UI linkages and other back-end cruft is not something you want to put off until the end.

Mike was working on the very cute designs for the ice cream objects as well. By the second day, we were able to pull together the code and art to make the beginnings of a game!

Unfortunately, my day job was incredibly busy the week of the jam, so some days I wasn't able to work on things at all. Over time, we were able to get Kid Internet's song implemented and bring in more textures and images to fill out the background and other menus.

The great thing about game jams is that it exposes all the weak points in your workflow. One thing I really have struggled with in Godot was shaders. During the week, I was able to make 4 or 5 different basic texture shaders, which allowed us to make the game and background feel more dynamic and animated.

Making the scrolling  background on the title screen was a treat, but the real fun one for me was getting the background color on the main game to shift between all the ice cream colors as a subtle way to indicate the game was progressing in difficulty.

On the last day, I also dove into quite a few more game juice style features. I worked on creating a system where I can generate a streak of light to move between two points and also added more animations and motion to most of the objects. I love how when an ice cream lands it rotates just a little bit. It's a small touch, but it really does add to the chaos!

There's one lingering bug that I just don't have the energy to squish right now, but on the whole I'm very pleased with how it turned out!

This was the first time I have really worked on a game with a team. Aside from doing some music for Interior Birdecorator last year.

Being in the developer role this time was fun and stressful. I had source control locally, but it wasn't accessible to anyone else so ultimately, everything needed to go through me to get into the game, which led to a lot of chaos with image versions and updates. Next time I do this, I definitely need a better solution where everyone has access to the game files.

I can definitely see the value in having a more well-defined project lead/manager. Since we were just collaborating in a Discord group chat, there was sometimes confusion as to who should work which graphics. Having some kind of Trello board or other task-based solution would be good so everyone knows what they should be working on.

UI elements like buttons had to be requested by me, but often the chat would scroll and my requests would get buried. I ended up making several things myself simply because it was faster. I felt bad stepping on other people's toes, but things had to get done one way or another!

In the end, I probably put 30-35 hours into developing this project. I think it turned out great. I learned a ton and created some new utilities that I can bring into future games as well.

Thanks for reading, hope you have fun with the game!