What is Game Jam Balance ?
First, for those who don't know what a Game Jam is, it's a game development event where you have to make a game in a limited amount of time. The theme of this one was “Balance” and was organized by WALGA between japanese and belgian students on the occasion of the Belgian Princely Economic Mission to Japan from 5th to 9th December 2022.
My first game in Unity
I've always been a fan of video games, but I never really thought about making one myself so when I received the invitation to this Game Jam, I decided to give it a try.
It wasn't my first time using Unity but I didn't knew much about it, so I followed a few tutorials to get familiar with the engine. I had previous experience with C++ and Java so learning C# wasn't hard at all.
The game
We first had a meeting with my team to discuss the game idea, after brainstorming for a while, we finally decided to make a puzzle game where the overall gameplay is based around the characters moving in comic book panels and mirrored movements to remind of the differences between our cultures reading directions.
The game is called Ecooks and you can download it here altough in my opinion, it still has a lot of room for improvement.
What I learned
Along with Unity, I gained a lot of knowledge about game design and working in a team, which is not really easy but I think we did a pretty good job considering the time we had and the fact that we were working on different timezones.
I also learned a lot about the Japanese culture of working in teams and how they handle meetings, which was really interesting and I'm really glad I had the chance to work with Japanese students, I look forward to working with them again in the future.
Conclusion
I had a great time working on this project and I'm so glad we won two prizes. I hope I'll be able to participate in more Game Jams in the future and I'm looking forward to see what the next one will be about !