Also a YouTube video:

Can you make a game in just 3 hours?

That is a good question, and apparently there is a game jam called TriJam which is being held every week where this is exactly what you need to do.

So I thought I would try and test myself by participating in it. How good of a game can I make in this short time period?

The 3 hours is only counting actual development time, making art and things like that, but coming up with the idea and uploading the project does not count.

I make this post mostly to analyze what parts took me longer than needed and where do I need to improve.

Planning

The theme for the jam was “Exploring Spacetime”. I don’t know if it is a good connection with the theme, but my idea was to fight enemies in space and controlling time as the only way to revert after you die.

Since theres only 3 hours my initial plan was to spend 1 hour to implement gameplay, then 1 hour to make art and sounds, and then spend the remaining hour polishing.

Making gameplay

I am using my own very raw engine that does not have a lot of features, so I had to copy things like a camera and even sprite rendering stuff quickly from previous project. After about 5 minutes I had project skeleton ready.

Next, I made a temporary player sprite and made player movement, and it took a bit less than 10 minutes.

After 10 more minutes I had enemies spawning and moving random direction.

Next 10 minutes were spent on making the player rotate towards the cursor when we are holding left mouse button. I wanted to make the rotation smooth instead of instant, but I guess this part should have been done during the polishing stage.

And after 10 more minutes I had player actually shooting, and it began to look something like an actual game.

Next I made improvements to enemy movement. Before they just were going straight in random direction, and now they go random position and after they arrive they choose another one.

Then I made enemies shoot too, and also made bullets hit their targets.

At this point I was at exactly 1 hour mark.

But there was still one most important thing left to be done for gameplay - controlling the time. I did this by saving all the game history and reverting the state when going back using that history. That took me 20 minutes to implement.

Making art

Timeline for making art and implementing it in the game:

• Draw the player - 5 minutes
• Fire from the thrusters - 10 minutes
• Making these work in game - 15 minutes
• Draw the enemy - 6 minutes
• Add it to the game - 2 minutes
• Draw shots for player and the enemy - 2 minutes
• Enemy nest - 3 minutes
• Background - 2 minutes
• Add everything left to the game - 5 minutes

Final adjustments before making sounds

After that was done a spent a bit of time playtesting and realising I want to make enemies spawn faster as time goes and also make two nests instead of one to make the game harder.

That left me with 40 minutes so I decided to do last things before making the sounds - showing some text on screen. That meant showing surviving time, telling the player to rewind time when they die and just showing the controls.

With 30 minutes left on the timer it was time to make sounds for the game

Sounds

Like I often like to do, I recorded everything with just my mouth and the microphone. The only sound I added the effect to was the “pew pew” sound of player shooting. I changed the pitch so it sounded more like a laser gun. All of that was done in 10 minutes.

And after 10 more minutes all the sounds were added to the game. Unfortunately I found a bug (in my engine?) of having a small delay between the loops of looping sounds and did not find a quick fix, so I had to delete the player thruster and the enemy buzzing sounds.

The end

And this is it. I did not think of anything else I wanted to do so the timer was stopped at 2 hours and 50 minutes.

I guess I mostly sticked to the plan, only switched making sounds and polishing parts, and making gameplay longer than planned but I think it turned out not that bad for a 3 hour game.

This jam is pretty fun and I would definitely recommend it to others. Will probably participate in it again to see if I will do better next time.

I am doing it live on twitch, so you can follow if you want to see me do it: https://www.twitch.tv/kuviman