For the 2024 University of Portsmouth Game Jam, I decided to collaborate with two other students to create the game Edtrotcity; a simple game where you play as Berquine the Dog Trot (half dog, half horse), who just wants to be an artist. After finding the sentient bust of Ernest B. Hay, Berquine has set out to capture the not-so-famous lawyer's portrait in hopes that he may share the hay that the statue so obviously promises, despite the struggle he faces thanks to his colour blindness.

For this game jam, we had 4 days to create a game in our group of three, with 1 artist and 2 programmers, with me as the only person with games development experience. Because of this, my role was not only to be a programmer, but also a designer and a producer, to help lead this project to be successful.

What we first decided was especially important was not to over scope. As we only had 4 days, and a very small team, it was important to make our goals clear and to make sure that everyone was aware of their roles and responsibilities. The first day of development was dedicated to this, which made development for the 3 days much smoother.

The subsequent few days were then focussed on development. By utilising both in person and online communication throughout development, it meant that all parts of the team were on the same page. Any new assets that were needed were quickly discussed and created with important input from both the programmers and the artists to make sure that the asset is not only practical for the task but also fitting the aesthetic of the game.

One of my most important pushes and parts of development was exporting the game to WebGL for itch.io’s play in browser. This was because the games intended play time is only a few minutes and so it didn’t make sense from a design standpoint to for a player to download the full game when their playtime may not even be as long as the download time itself. This was a stretch goal, however, I found it to be a very important one. Exporting to WebGL meant a lot of changes to UI would need to be made as the layout of a WebGL window and a full application are different. Thanks to this major final push, our game was executable not only on Windows and iOS but also in browser.

Thanks to the constant communication and mutual input throughout development this game jam was the smoothest I have ever participated in. However, due to the short span of this event, we did not have much time for testing, as a result, most of our user feedback on the game came at the showcase itself. Our main criticism came from the colour picking mechanism that often-confused players as it worked on a cycle. Instead, players were trying to click their desired colour on the easel asset. This provided really useful input into how things that we had put as stretch goals, like specific colour changes, should have been in the main goals, or a more urgent stretch goal.

In all, our teams work paid off with us being awarded the award for both best art and best design at the UoP Game Jam awards ceremony. This was extremely rewarding to our team, as a group who primarily had not worked in games before. Working in this group has further solidified my excitement in working in teams of varieties of people to promote new ideas and makes me so excited for next year, and how our independent lines of study and work will divulge to create unique games in 2025.