PTA Meeting From Hell Postmortem

CONCEPT

PTA Meeting From Hell! was a result of the GJL Game Parade Spring 2021 theme: Strength Lies in Differences. Our team of five chose to build a game around teachers having to defend their classrooms against overly protective parents using their respective skills. It ended up being a mixture of a Tower Defense and a Lost Vikings style game, as you swap between teachers to position them to take down different spawns. This was my first jam ever, as well as most of my teammates, and the amount I learned over a single week is insane. We worked for a week straight across four different countries and made something ambitious, clunky, and tremendously exciting. I'll break down our scoring and my thoughts on it, as we finished #21/72 in the overall ratings.

Gameplay: #17/72

I loved our gameplay - Or, more accurately, the idea of it. Given that this was my first jam, I pushed to employ the use of a framework: the TopDownEngine Unity asset. It handled most of the core functionality for the game, from character movement to camera bounding to abilities and automated AI. Since we had only two developers on this project, both new, I figured the framework would give us an easy boost so that we could focus on polish and feel. We were INCREDIBLY ambitious for a first time game: Five teachers, ten abilities, three enemy types, and a repeating gameplay loop. Oof.

I severely underestimated the difficult of adapting a framework for edge cases that it doesn't support natively. While I highly recommend the TopDownEngine asset, my lack of familiarity with Unity development made it extremely difficult to avoid creating tricky bugs or to expand the engine to handle our specific needs. While I believe we received good ratings for the core concept, I firmly believe we could have saved ourselves a sizeable headache by implementing simpler and easier to manage features for the sake of a game jam. Moving forward, that's definitely a mindset I carry forward in other game jams: When time is a factor, understanding every single piece of your code is more important than ever. 

Shoutout to my engineering partner, Asfandyar Butt, who learned and implemented A* pathfinding overnight.

Audio: #21/72

Harry Nixon and Callum Clarke did a fantastic job creating our SFX and music, respectively. Despite a huge time zone difference, they worked hard to implement a precise rhythm to the game that don't just add to the tempo, but make using abilities feel immersive and powerful. 

I handled the majority of audio implementation, and along the way learned the difficulties of managing sound levels for consistency between SFX and music. Some sounds needed to be on a delay to match animations, while others needed to properly overlay each other as ability sounds and other SFX mixed together. After this game, I had to spend a while researching a better way to create sound managers. Check out Code Monkey's tutorial on Youtube if you'd like to improve your own skills!

Visuals: #22/72

Katie-Mai Gilbert did an INCREDIBLE job single handedly creating every art asset you see in game (outside of fonts). As this was my first time working in a 2D game, I had a hard time keeping up with the volume of sprites she cranked out: Multiple animations per character (idle, attack, ability use, walk, defeat, etc), a hand-painted map, and even the animations for ability projectiles and floating weapons. They were fantastic, but as mentioned in the Gameplay section, getting them to overlap without breaking became increasingly difficult. Major lessons learned: Change sprite settings on the import, not the prefab, make sure to deactivate asset compression, and learn how to setup sprites to organically repeat for tiles. It was also about a month later when I discovered how to use Unity Tiles and I seriously regret not implementing them in this project. 

Sadly: The biology teacher had a fantastic walk animation where he hopped around on a giant frog. This animation broke in the last hour and didn't make it into the final build, but it was wonderfully made. I do believe that if I had the understanding of Unity sprite systems that I do now back when I did this jam, we could have scored much higher in this department. 

Fun: #23/72

Frankly? I'm amazed we scored as high as we did for this. The nature of a programmer's first Game Jam is that it involves an unhealthy amount of caffeine and a complete lack of sleep. By the time I submitted this project, I knew several abilities that were still having issues and wasn't even sure if you could play the game to completion. Once again, I think this is an area where we scored well for potential: The mixture of a Tower Defense game and a Lost Vikings style AI is really, really cool when it works. It just needs a few better colliders to work, in our case. 

Overall: #21/72

In college, I earned a Computer Science degree while retaining a massive fear of Hackathons due to imposter syndrome. It's a difficult mindset to address, and stepping into the world of video game development can be a huge hurdle to overcome.

And yet, we did. A team of strangers across the globe came together to make something they were really excited about. Most of us were implementing things along the way, learning for the first time, and discovering new ways to do things we loved to do. The result is held together by duck-tape and sticks, but I'm extremely proud of it for a very first attempt. I want to particularly thank my team for being kind, patient, understanding, and relentlessly enthusiastic. I've used the energy from this first jam to keep going, because when you finally get over that imposter syndrome and do it once: You want to keep going. It gets easier to push. And, eventually, you might even get a bit better at it.

Here's hoping.

- Mark

Cheers to:

- Asfandyar Butt, Harry Nixon, Callum Clarke, and Katie-Mai Gilbert