Ludum Dare

Late September during the societies fair, I joined the game development society to learn new skills and make new connections with people outside my degree. Furthermore, around the time I joined the society, an opportunity came up to participate in a game jam. A game jam is a contest where participants come together into teams to make a video game from scratch. Usually, the contest timeframe is 72 hours or 24 hours. The event we participated in was the Ludum Dare, an event for 72 hours, and ten people, including myself, were a part of the contest to create the game. The game we made was called Reactor #4, and it was a puzzle type game to stop the reactor from exploding.

My role in the project was to colour and texturise the 3D models for the video game and design UI designs. I was supposed to colour in all the models; however, due to time limitations and pulling a back muscle, I wasn't able to and got some help from the society's president. This experience was inspiring and fun for me as this was my first time working on a live project that was video game related, and I had never tried texturing models before. I ended up texturing two models and designing UI for the buttons and the radiation bar that was used within the video game.

There are some skills I would like to develop more into to be more prepared for the next game jam. Most importantly, I would say that being able to work on a shorter time scale and balance more on quality and quantity. These are my most important skills to work on because I was the slowest working on my tasks compared to other people. However, this was my first game jam, and other members were understanding about it. This won't be my final game jam as I would like to take part in future ones throughout the year.