Post MegaJam Thoughts

Written by our lead developer Joshua Johnson who built our entry solo over the last 7 days.-

Whew, what a week...  Congrats to all of the teams and individuals who participated in the 2020 Epic MegaJam.  For this jam I decided to work on a project completely solo (what was I thinking?).  Overall the jam turned out to be a great learning experience to get myself familiar with the latest tools coming around the corner in Unreal Engine 4.26.

The Theme:

Before the jam started my thoughts had been going back to my early childhood playing Pitfall and wanting to re-create that simple but somewhat frustrating game-play.  The theme turned out to be "It's been a long time, but we're not done yet".  Which is supposed to be taken however you want, so I took it as I miss Pitfall so let's build something of an homage since more recent incarnations of the game are barely Pitfall if we're being honest.

The Gameplan:

As CTO and lead developer at TREE, my job is create solutions from emerging and existing technology using anything under the sun, not necessarily to be the best programmer, artist, sound engineer, etc.  With that in mind my main goal when creating this game was to utilize any and all tools necessary to complete my work on the game (Properly listing anything used that was created before the jam of course).  This allowed me to mostly focus on interesting environment hazards, and an in-game cinematic that is more like Indiana Jones than Pitfall, but hey it works...

The Result:

In the end I was able to achieve about 80% of what I had in mind for the game.  Going into the jam with the intention of using 4.26 I knew that if I wanted to integrate some existing assets it would take some extra work since many are not setup for it yet.  This probably cost a bit more time than if I had used 4.25, but one of my personal goals for the jam was to use some of the new tools in 4.26.  Some of the ones I utilized were: Landmass Brush BP, New Water plugin including river brush BP, and volumetrics.  I was very pleased with the results of these tools for the environment design in JungleFall, and it allowed me to spend most of my time on custom hazard blueprints used in the game.

Thinking back I would have finished a simple menu for the game first.  It loads up and plays just fine, but there is no easy way to exit the game and I should have known better than to leave that for towards the end and then running out of time (which will always happen in a game jam).

Overall I'm really glad to have taken on this challenge, and am happy with the result.  The game is fun to play, though a bit awkward to exit and there are one or two bugs that require a restart.  Old school pitfall fans will enjoy the simplicity, and difficulty to make it through the level completed for the game jam.

Future Plans

We have lot's of other projects going on at the moment, but we may try to polish what I started into a more refined game once we have time, but one that still retains a focus on simple side-scrolling platform action but with modern game-play and vivid 3D scenery.