Hi, I'm Majo, I just wanted to talk about the development of our last jam game Don't wake the Dragon

I worked with my fiance Esteban, and a close friend, Roberto. It wasn't our first game jam, so we had the teamwork in our favor, and it helped a lot in the brainstorming phase, it also helped having Roberto staying in our house for the duration of the jam.

I might get a bit personal here, since it was my idea that was selected (you can skip this paragraph). It was founded on the idea of "walking on eggshells", because until not much time ago I was living like this. I always have seen my mom as a dragon (metaphorically speaking, of course), you know: arrogant, powerful, proud, majestic, dangerous. There was one rule in my house that was don't wake her wrath, but anyone with narcissistic parents know that's one tricky rule, right? Her parenting taught me to live walking on eggshells, even until adulthood. So you see the One Rule theme worked like a charm for me (in a therapeutic sense), to portray my experience into our video game.

Anyway, after we chose the game mechanic, we started identifying the main parts of the game, in such way we could divide the work. We decided we would start programming the next morning, and leave the friday for planning and to rest from the workday. Esteban made the UI, Roberto the Core and I worked on the Spawner (+ the assets because I'm the early bird and I could take care of the assets to speed up the development).

(our all-purpose whiteboard! sadly I didn't think of taking a picture of the previous ideas. At the very left, there's my very first version of the concept of the game, where the dragon was sleeping in the middle of the room)

The next morning, I was collecting some assets from the Unity Asset Store, anything I could find useful. Thank the heavens I found a free dragon asset, or else I would've to improvise lmao. Thank to these assets, I created the Unity project, a very basic scene and set up the cloud service all before the other two sleepyheads woke up. After the breakfast we started coding.

I created the Spawner based on the one from the CWC tutorials, but I changed some details.

(the dragon's lair upside down. As you can see the gold coin piles are just rotated rocks with a "gold coin material" asset from the Store)

It spawns treasures or traps depending on its children, so here the pink rectangles spawn treasures and the big purple one spawns traps. This has some flaws though, sometimes it spawns branches on the other side of the walls, nothing that affects the gameplay. I also made it to spawn treasures with a certain probability, this way the most valuable the rarer.

After I finished my part, I started merging our work, and the boys keep working on the player and the dragon, meanwhile I was working on the ambience setting, I wanted it to be a dark, dim ambience, a peaceful place for a dragon's beauty sleep, but a dangerous place for an adventurer, so I applied a fog to achieve than, which also made the treasure to be harder to find. I gave the player a light source, so it looks like they were holding a torch

(view of the cave just before the dragon's attack)

I also worked on the fire particle system, and it was so fun! I wanted it to turn the dark cave into a hellish place, so I added light source to the particle system, which I might want to tweak in the future because I noticed it has a negative effect on the performance, but damn it looks so cool!

(view of the cave during the dragon's attack)

After I pushed my changes, Esteban somehow managed to attach the flame effect into the dragon's jaw. Meanwhile Roberto was looking for sound effects and found that terrific roar. Now the dragon was alive! and angry...

At that point, the last day, we were working on small details. I made sure to keep the backlog updated. I worked on the build and the itch.io page, while the boys were tuning the game.

(our backlog a couple of hours before the deadline)

The last half hour was the most stressful of all! Esteban wanted to change something on the UI and I was against it, but he did it anyway xd. Anyway, after I built the project I uploaded it in full stress mode 5 minutes before the deadline! ... just to realize the deadline was 1 hour later XD. We laughed and went to lunch. It was a good jam :)

There's a lot of things a want to improve, most of them we got from the feedback (thank you all who tested our game! <3), I learned a lot in a technical and personal sense and I hope to participate in more jams from now on.

Thank you very much for reading!