Abnor – June 24, 2017
Posted on July 9, 2017 in Game Jam
Abnor is a Collectible Monster Battle Simulation. A player starts off with a basic monster, can battle other monsters and collect them if they are defeated. Combat is turn based with the player choosing monster abilities. The combat interface is driven by a simple button menu at the bottom of the screen. We spent more time, than other game jams, on under-the-hood mechanics and stats for the game this time around.
A new phaser game chassis was tested out as well this time which, sadly, presented some additional challenges that slowed our progress. Challenges such as a new dev / build process using webpack and babel (for ES6) instead of gulp / node / ES5. However, we learned a lot of cool things about ES6 as a result. And the distributable packaging of the app using webpack is rather slick.
We also set aside some time at the end for a little more formal scrum retrospective ceremony this time and here were the observations attendees made about this game jam session:
What we can do better:
- Improve on-boarding time to get going on the project that day.
- Air conditioning would be nice. It is turned off on Saturdays.
- Help the Lead Designer for that day understand scope of the work that can potentially be done.
- Help encourage the Lead Designer to better plan the game out ahead of time.
- Get lunch on time.
- Improve scaffolding structure (i.e. have working Unit testing and Makefile)
What went well:
- Having a game scaffolding helped. Prior to this jam we always built it or copy pasta’d from another project.
- Lot’s of great learning such as Phaser and ES6.
- Lead Designer got what he wanted out of the day!
- Good collaboration among the group.
- It was great to see some first timers there!
