The Mystical Gopher Posse

Link to game

This was my first ever Global Game Jam that i participated in and I was part of a team of 6 of aspiring game developers that created a game called “The Mystical Gopher Posse”

Game Concept

• The Mystical Gopher Posse was supposed to be a single player rhythm game where player have to tap the proper key to match the note at the appropriate time. 
• The idea for the game came from a randomly generated name from Global Game Jam 2014 where the theme for that year was “We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Team composition: 1 Designers, 2 Programmers and 3 Artist
Position in project: Game Designer

Roles and Responsibilities

• Game Designer 
• UI Designer
• Sound Designer

Description of my work and responsibilities

1. To ensure that the music and sound effect fits the overall theme and feel of the game.
2. To ensure that the user interface does not hinder the player's focus to the game. .

Problems Faced
Being aspiring developers with zero experience lets us experience the full brunt of the hardship a developer has to go through solving problem by ourselves within a limited time frame.

1.  The first problem we encountered was that our Unity was unable to automatically synchronized the notes to the song as that is a feature only found in the paid version of Unity.
• Thus, we had to map the notes to match the beat manually which used up too much time that we lack.
2. Secondly, the artists lack knowledge on how to animate the gophers properly which created  a hassle between them and the programmers.
• One of the programmers managed to fix the animation, and we were able to progress on.
3. Thirdly, being an inexperienced game designer, my user interface designs were pretty bad and does not convey the proper information needed to the player.
• I tried to clean up my design and made it slightly better compared to our first draft but it was still bad.
• This served as a good experience to learn to do better UI design
4. Lastly, we underestimated the amount of time we actually needed to complete the game.
• We had 12 hours left when we realized that we were running out of time to actually finish the game.
• We had to cut some features and cut explaining what the entire ordeal was about. Thus, the ending didn't make much sense being there.

 Learning Outcome 
Well, I learnt a lot from this game jam and hopefully I can apply what I've learnt to my future projects.