Made with: Unity



The project

As the Pocket Master, your job is to help people in need.
Use your magical pocket to change objects size and please everyone!
Pocket everything! Objects, people, entire rooms... The pocket world has no limit.




Context

This was a 5 days long game jam for the GMTK Game Jam 2024 under the theme Built to Scale, made by myself. I made a 2D puzzle game about putting things in your pocket, and with the ability to swap the size of two elements.




Brainstorming

My process when finding ideas for game jams is very simple.
I throw out as many ideas and words as possible, to have a large quantity of ideas.
Then I select with few favorites with 3 criteria:

  • Motivation : How much the idea excites me.
  • Scope : It must be feasible without crunching.
  • Challenge : I want to learn new things with each project.

I develop the ones I selected.
I then chose my favorite among them : That's my concept!




Organisation

It's really important to me to stay organised when working, with priorities and deadlines.
For this project, I used Milanote to keep track of everything (Todo lists, references, sketches).




Day 1

The first day of the jam was dedicated to brainstorming, planning and prototyping.
Visually, I wanted to try something other than pixel art, but since my first test took me too long and was not as pretty as I hoped, I finally went to pixel art, still challenging myself by learning Aseprite during the jam.
I made a quick mockup to quickly define what a screen of the game could look like.

But since I went with pixel art, another problem arose : Scaling.
My game mechanic is about scaling things, and you definitely shouldn't scale pixel art.
The simple solution : Make more assets.
Since the art style allowed me to quickly create assets, it was a perfect solution.

Finally, I programmed a simple technical prototype by importing a drag 'n drop system I already made for another project.
It's important to me to make reusable code, so I can gain time where I need it.




Day 2

The second day of the jam was dedicated to taking the visual and technical prototype further.
I made the most important assets in the game, and had a playable game loop at the end of the day, with 2 puzzles to showcase the main mechanic.
The only things left at this point are to make more content, and to polish everything.

That day, I made a scalable way to make more puzzles, with data contained as scriptable objects.
I used Odin Inspector to serialize dictionaries, to be able to edit them in the inspector.
This was useful to assign different sprites for each character or object for different sizes.
This was also a great way to make more puzzles without writing new code, which made the puzzle design integration process much smoother.




Day 3

The third day I thought the game missed something.
I thought the main mechanic could be developed further, so I brainstormed some ideas.
The main focus of the game, the ability to swap the size of two objects was actually what I thought of that day.
I took the time to make more levels, using that mechanic and realised it was a lot easier for me to have level design ideas.
So, I shifted the focus of the game to go all out with this mechanic, since it was the thing that brought the most fun in the game.

On top of that, I made a cutscene system that day, to give more life to the puzzles by adding narration.




Day 4

The fourth day was the final day I gave myself the objective to complete the game.
I made the sound design, and polished what was left.
I added a tutorial for a better onboarding.
I made a few more puzzles to have 8 puzzles in total.
Finally, I published the game on itch.io since I wanted to avoid last-minute bugs or upload issues.




Day 5

The final day, I rested.
I believe it's important to avoid crunch, which is quite frequent during game jams.




Conclusion

In the end, I'm proud of this project, since the game turned out great, and I learned a few things while developing it.
I generally improved my programming, art and level design skills, while discovering new tools like Aseprite and Odin Inspector.
I always enjoy game jams, they're a great way to have fun making short games, and to discuss with other creators.

During the jam review period, I got a lot of positive feedback.
The Pocket Master ranked 18th out of 7500 games overall. 17th in style, 53rd in creativity, 70th in enjoyment.

I'll definitely take part in more jams!

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