It is a little post-production blog about our freshly made group called Bucketheads. As we now finally got back to our normal lives, we found it interesting to share our work process and the problems we encountered along the way.

We are all first-year students at the faculty of design, specializing in Game Design. Only one month in, we were already assigned to create a game prototype from scratch, with zero previous knowledge, to compete with hundreds of games and thousands of participants. With our grades at stake, the overall stress was high from the start, and problems appeared even before the theme was announced. We didn’t have graphic tablets, and none of us had in-depth programming knowledge, so we had to improvise. I (artallester) did all the coding, while we had three people on the "design team" and one who provided the music (Maybe you will see their comments down below). The graphic designers had mostly worked in traditional art before this jam and had little to no experience working digitally. The only programmer on the team knew what an Integer is, and that’s about it.

Nevertheless, the theme was announced at 1 AM on the first day, and our first call on Discord took place at 8 AM. After a quick brainstorming session, we came up with the idea for the game, which involved a grandma (called Tamara, by the way), and we were ready to conquer the world! The graphic team stayed on the call all day, while our music guy was in the recording studio. By the end of day one, we had a little prototype with basic mechanics finished, and we were all hyped, thinking we could make it in time.

Day 2: It turned out that on the first day we were already quite tired, and the real work was just beginning. Speaking for myself, implementing a second level with a saved score and upgrades made everything not only difficult to control in my spaghetti code but also constantly breaking, so it was scratched entirely as you can see in our game. My lowest point was spending 5 hours trying to make the weapon spin around the player based on mouse position, and not finishing it. As you can imagine, it was frustrating. During this time, all the main characters, animations, and backgrounds were done, as well as the sound, so the game started to have a visual aspect and some vibes.

Day 3: The graphic team worked like a Chinese factory before Christmas. The number of sprites we had for this game not only surprised me but also crashed Unity the first time I tried to import them. After some tweaking and "balancing," the game reached a somewhat funny stage, where we started decorating the apartment as if we were playing The Sims 4. And of course, what’s a game jam without forgetting something important? We forgot the game icon! So while the draft of the game was uploading and being tested five times, the icon was created. We also realized the music was too loud with only 30 minutes left on the timer, so we just prayed for the health of our players’ ears.

A separate message from the designers: In the final hours before the deadline, we didn’t just start going crazy on Discord – it felt like we were turning into those cockroaches ourselves, while also trying our best to improve the visual aspect of the game. We hope we’ve managed to capture at least a bit of your attention.

So, after 3 days of little sleep, quick learning, and going crazy 🐀 from constantly being on Discord, the game was made. Basically, this is the first step we’ve taken into the industry, and we hope to get your attention on this game as we gave our absolute best (considering we had zero previous experience) in creating this product. We hope you find it interesting, and remember the saying: "Don't resist the mutation if you’re not a chicken!" And if it lags, just reload the page. I remind you, none of us really knows how to write working code.

Go check it out!

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