After the jam


Here is a short postmortem of my jam submission.

Theme

The theme for the game jam was following, directly quoted from the jam's page:

Unique 2D Platformer game mechanic - Build a mechanic that could qualify as a unique selling point for a sidescrolling platformer game. Some examples of these mechanics: Shovelknight's "Shovel drop", Celeste's "air dash", Bomb Chicken's "bomb eggs", Sonic's spin boost, etc...
The art can be 2D, 2.5D or 3D. As long as it is a sidescroller.

I didn't have many ideas what to work on from the theme, so I chose the cat to cast the primary role. And to make game "strategic" I decided that movement is possible only by jumping.

MVP

I tried to make the Minimum Viable Product as fast as I could, but had many other tasks in real-life to handle. It did offer quite a challenge to get working on the game.

But I did manage to get the MVP done, but the game is not fun as I wanted as I didn't have proper time to do the level design.

What was missing?

From the original plan, there were some things that I couldn't introduce. 

  • I thought to animate the water and some fishes jumping from there
  • Different types of platforms to jump on, like tree's branch and rock
  • Different collectables in addition to fish
  • Multiple levels
  • Timing; to see how fast player can complete the level by blasting through by quickly jumping

Currently I have no plans to continue working on this game project. I have some projects already under work, so I will continue on those but cannot say about the future. We might see sequel one day :P

Learning

The great part of the jams are that usually it helps to grasp  some tool, concept or other idea when doing intensive work because you have deadline what won't move.

I think that I learned more about the Bolt, how to use it in a different kind of situations. There are still lot to learn and optimize.

Thanks

Thanks to all that have played the game. And big thanks also to the nice community of Bolt!

Files

JumpCat.app.zip 18 MB
Aug 12, 2018
CatJump_Windows.zip 16 MB
Aug 14, 2018

Get Cat Jump

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