Introduction

I did a few game jams in Unity over the past few years, so I started this Bevy jam relatively confident that I would have something in the end.

My personal definition for a « successful » game jam is:

• Published
• Playable
• Have fun while doing it 👍
• Hopefully fun to play 👀

I think my game is currently not that fun 😭, but has a real potential of being fun with very few tweaks, so I consider my jam successful 🥳.

How did I prepare my jam ?

Often when I jam, I want to experiment something technically: new framework, algorithm, concepts…

This time my objective was to make a multiplayer game.

Before the jam date I developped a small game agnostic multiplayer library: https://github.com/Vrixyz/litlnet.

litlnet is not production ready, full of todos and missing features, but a published game means it’s at least usable!

How did I start ?

I had technical constraints from current litlnet WIP state.

I had only implemented websockets being usable with wasm, so it meant a « slow » paced game, I wouldn’t do a fight game. Also, shared data is json string instead of sending a more clever format… packets should be small then.

I knew I had to keep my scope short and defined:

• I ruled out turn-based games because I would have had to polish the turn-by-turn gameplay for it to be fun. Also, bad connections and high number of tunrs to wait could ruin the experience.
• I settled for a « whack a mole ». I knew I couldn’t do « ultra fast » network communication, But hey, premature optimisation is bad and better try it than regret.

How did I jam ?

I laid out a small design document (bullet points) :

• bevies spawn on a map
• ≈10 people play on the same map, over the duration of a day, then can drop in or out seemlessly
• a player clicking on a bevy gains 1 point.
• sometimes, multiple players are connected together, and fight over the same bevies to gain points
• a scoreboard should be shown as a way to keep players active and willing to beat others
• The unfair advantage is to the player connected first, with the best connection or the most time available that day.

Honestly, I thought it could be fun, and I had fun on my early playtesting!

Last minute deployment

Development is very different from Production: I was using a free heroku server, resetting after 30 minutes, dropping all memory (bevies and scores).

When I implemented the scoreboard, I figured 30 minutes is a too short time and that would lead to a useless feature, with players wondering why there is a scoreboard where they are the only players.

Sooo 1 hour before the deadline 😱, I got rid of that constraint: 1 reset per day!.

(well I wanted no reset, but it turns out heroku has a nightly reboot…)

How my jam did

First few days were OK: there was quickly 500-1000 bevies, but with help of friends and bevy enthusiasts, we kept the number low, even sometimes challenging ourselves to be the quickest to click on 1 poor bevy spawning.

Then the enthusiasm dropped, and there was 5000 bevies, that was a bit too many clicks to do, the page was too intimidating. Some players spun off auto clickers to help with that (I’m actually glad they did, but I’m taking notes that cheat might easily ruin the fun for others)

Then autoclickers want away, and suddenly 20 000 bevies were there, obliterating the fun because the goal of having no bevies to the screen wasn’t percieved as achievable.

💀

How my jam will evolve ?

• Probably not.

But!

• Bevies spawn rate depending on connected players amount
• Disappearing bevies
• Capping bevies count
• Special bevies
  • clickable only by player x
  • Lose points on click
  • needs more than 1 click
  • needs a click by different players
  • splitting bevies
  • moving bevies…?
• lose points if click on nothing
• non-resetting scoreboard

Most of those would be quite straightforward to implement, and maybe fix the fun !? Come help https://github.com/Vrixyz/whack-a-bevy 😜

Thanks

Last anecdote:

• I implemented a 6 letters limit to the player names, to avoid too crazy insults, I think it was very worth it.

That’s all!

💖 Thanks to you 💖, and to everyone who played Whack a Bevy 💖