Mga Mensaheng Nasagip sa Hangin
Mga Mensaheng Nasagip sa Hangin (Words Caught from the Air) is a timing-based game where you tune up a radio tuner during the Marcos regime. The radio reveals important facts about the regime and a story about a man living through it. A Global Gam Jam 2017 submission with the theme of Waves.
Highlights
- Designed and developed a timing based game system with sounds adapting to the tune.
- Developed a system that adds voice over for the story beats of the game.
Learnings
With this game representing my very first game jam game, there are several things I learned from this event:
Don’t start from a very big scope especially if this is your first time. Oftentimes, they always say to dream big and then start trimming it down, and, oftentimes, it is true. However, for this project it really costed us as we used most of the time designing and figuring things out. Ideas were just in the air and nothing productive is coming out of it.
Always try to build the game at certain intervals of the development. We all know that sometimes what works in engine might not reflect correctly in build. And we ran into that kind of problem by the time that we were going to release it. The builds kept crashing and we had to frantically find the issue and make it work. It did come out okay in the end, but still this lesson is a hard-earned one.
Finally, get some sleep! We do have a stereotype in the industry of gamers and game developers of staying overnight or working as night owls, but I cannot stress this point enough. I literally went to a phase of having so much energy to work on things at midnight only for me to be brain dead and caught staring into space by the day. The team forced me to go home and get some sleep which refreshed me and got me back into the game before the final day.