Reflection: Scream Jam

Perhaps a bit late on this, but in late October, we had the chance to participate in yet another game jam. This time, it was Halloween themed. The jam was appropriately titled “Scream Jam.” Despite the name and theme however, you were not required to make a horror game. Nonetheless, we tried to do so and I quickly realized that I am not good at making horror games. Granted, I can kind of see that coming because I myself do not play many horror games.

Inspired by classic rail shooters such as Typing of the Dead, my brother Alex, and my good friend Connor decided to tackle the taking of creating our own take on a typing based shooter.

Enter Crypt Script, our not-so-horror based typing shooter. Since none of us were really experienced in art, we opted to borrow sprites from a free source site. Rather than dig into the horror elements, we ended up choosing a bundle of strangely cute looking monsters for our game. In hindsight, maybe we could’ve tried to lean more into a horror-ish style, but no regrets on our decision.

Scoring and Results

Out of the 500+ entries, I’d say our game ranked middle of the pack. The story and horror elements definitely hurt us as there was barely anything for either category. Although I do appreciate that people liked our sound design and aesthetics. Aside from free music assets on the internet, I had my friend Erik pull up two themes he composed previously in the past. The two songs were titel “Failure” and were simply two variation of the same piece. The reason for this song title was because Erik viewed the pieces as “Failures” at first. However, we liked the songs and they served us well as our main menu and game over music.

Takeways

Game jams are still fun for us, but I think after this latest round, we are even more sure that video game industry work is not for us. Why? Because of crunch time. The Scream Jam gave us 1 week to create our work, but when we released Crypt Script, there was only 20 minutes left in the competition. Further more, there were a plethora of bugs to fix. The music didn’t even loop! While multiple players left positive comments, there were others who mentioned that the music stopped playing after the song finished. In our games, we need the music to keep repeating! All of these problems could’ve been fixed if we just had more time to take a look and test our work. Now I understand how developers must feel when their game releases with a ton of bugs and problems. There is no such thing as lazy game development, only tight deadlines.