After spending a week straight working hard on our game submission for the Brackey’s 2023 Game Jam on Itch.io, we have come up with, and produced, a game that we are proud to have developed. Throughout the week we learned new skills and traits that will help in our future developments; some of which being:

• Knowing when to quit
• When to start polishing
• Taking in feedback
• Focusing on the gameplay first
• Modeling and Texturing
• Organization

Now, when I say “Quit”, in this instance, although it seems like a negative way to think about things, I believe it was exactly what we needed to do. From the beginning, I was constantly trying to think of how much the game actually needed to be fun, and how long it needed to be to feel fulfilling. I thought of different genres of games that we could do to stay within the bounds of our abilities, and settled on a first person platformer. Originally, the game was supposed to be nothing but platforming and jumping. While I believed our character controller was fun to pilot, I felt there needed to be a bit more to it, so we added a grappling hook, and boy, did that add to the gameplay way more than I imagined. From there, I thought we needed to add a bit more, scope creep was, yet again, present and I was falling victim to it. Before quitting, I kept adding in mechanics for the sake of adding more substance to the game for a sense of “uniqueness.” Afterwards, I took a few steps back to mess around with the current mechanics we had, and to my surprise it felt exactly as I wanted it to; enjoyable and fulfilling, the two most important qualities that make a game good. This was the moment I realized I needed to quit adding to the game, and work on the quality of the game over the quantity of mechanics.

Along with knowing when to quit, you have to learn when to start and where to start. All too often I get caught up in the visuals of a game. I want to make them look as good as it feels and sounds, but before you begin to polish up the looks of anything, the foundation has to be great. I applied this concept to my level designs. I had made many different platforms but only used one for the functionality of the game before ever implementing the others. After it felt good to play, I changed the models up. I added a broken car and some sidewalk tiles just to add variety to the platforms and visuals. This did so much for the atmosphere of the game. Instantly there was more color to the level, and it felt like you were in more than just a field of floating rocks.

Going back to what I said above, I knew when to quit adding and just be content with the core mechanics of the game. This allowed me to make five levels while keeping the gameplay in focus the whole time. By doing so, I was able to make sure each level feels like a continuation of the last, rather than each level feeling like a new level, and for a story driven game, this is the design you want. The progression through levels should match the progression through the story.

Another crucial part of this experience is learning to accept feedback and criticism. I am lucky enough to have people around me that don’t sugar coat things, and I really appreciate that, because it is a useful tool that not many people receive. Having feedback is super important as long as you can sift through all of it to find constructive criticism. People are always going to judge projects they have no hands in making; that’s just how humans are, but just because they don’t have a hand in making the project doesn’t mean there is no value in it. In most cases the players are the ones that keep your games successful, so being able to add in content and ideas they would like to see will only benefit your game. As long as the core fundamentals of the game remain intact you should work through feedback and criticism to improve your game; for existing players as well as expanding out to new players.

Continuing to stay organized was another skill that we had to work on. I fully admit that it's mainly me that causes the issues. I don’t think it's a huge deal, until it is in fact a huge deal, and it's something I am working on to better myself. However, with this project I was forced to stay organized because it helps speed up progress and keep things moving forward. I still admit that I'm not the best at it, version control and organized notes aren't the easiest things to me, but I’m getting there.

I’m tired of searching and waiting for someone that can do art to come along to work with me, and for this reason I just learned it myself. I pulled up Blender and started making rocks. Though they aren’t the best by any means, they work and function as a rock should. After modeling them in Blender, I ported the models over to Armor Paint and hand painted the textures of each model. While again, I’m not the best at it, I was enjoying it, and personally think the textures came out really well. I used the bits and pieces of color theory that I know to make them. After that, it was just importing them into Unity and setting it all up. I almost believe that modeling and texturing helped me visualize and execute the level design to a higher degree than I would have otherwise.

All of these skills that we learned individually, and as a team, will help us further with every game we work . I personally look forward to working on more modeling and integrating myself further in the way that the game will look as an end product from start to finish of each process. We’ve already been implementing this more organizational approach to our other projects and it's helping a ton already.

Moving forward past the game jam

Before the jam we were originally working on a game that just wasn’t quite enough fun. I thought about a lot of things that could be done to fix it. Maybe it was just missing that artistic element, maybe it was the lack of difficulty, animations, and/or sounds. I wasn’t sure what it was missing, until I thought the game would be immensely more fun if it was Coop. I felt like it would add a lot more playtime to the game, and so we began to rebuild it. We are learning a new game engine that better supports our needs for this type of game, and ultimately the game has been delayed. We don’t want to release games that are half finished so we are opting to push the date back to make the game as well as we can make it. We also thought after the game jam that Middle Man was really fun so we have decided to continue working on the game for an upcoming Steam release.

For Middle Man, we plan on adding a lot to it. We already have numerous changes that we are looking into getting fixed; bug fixes that we ran out of time to get cleaned up, and overall better design choices across the board. Some more of these changes include:

• More Sounds
• New Custom made Music
• More models
• Revamped Story
• Voice Overs
• Challenges
• And many many more Levels

Many of these are already being worked on because we are working intently to get the game to a more polished and finished product state for the release. Along with this I will be making devlogs for Middle Man biweekly until we get closer to the full release. Tune in March 8th for the next devlog. I can’t wait to show you the work that we do over the coming weeks!

If you’d like to check out “Middle Man” as it is at the time of writing, you can find it here: https://underbudget-games.itch.io/middle-man