Against The World

This event was an incredible learning experience for me. The time limit, the theme, the randomized group members, and the gameplay constraints made for a perfect storm of chaos and creativity that I could not wait to sink my teeth into.
Here's what went right:

The Gameplay Concept - The concept of the game that was eventually agreed upon was a dream-state casual platformer with a focus on narrative elements. This was a great start to the project as the only mechanics needed in a casual platformer are a move and jump. This meant that we could focus more on the aspects that would make us different in the eyes of the player, namely the narrative elements and environment.
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The Environment Design - The aesthetic design of the game fits beautifully into the theme of the game jam. Moody lighting, floating objects, streetlights sticking out of buildings, a place reminiscent of somewhere you've been before, all of these things contributed to the excellent aesthetic feeling of the game.
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Communication - I took up the reigns as much as possible to keep all parties in communication with each other during the time span we were given, giving out kudos whenever possible to keep the spirits high. This meant transferring between Discord calls between the different disciplines to make sure I was always up to date on the flow of work, and that I was able to relay that information to the appropriate parties who needed to know.

As this was my first event, there were bound to be challenges to learn from.
Here's what went wrong:

Mechanic Overscope - When first brainstorming the game, I made the mistake of advocating to the group to keep adding features. In this case, for the narrative side of things, I had wanted to add different endings depending on if the player chose to go into a different door. Additionally, I wanted to add a mechanic that would sort of act as a soft-reset if the player fell from a platform that was high up (similar to Pogostuck). These all met the chopping block, along with a few other ideas, ultimately due to time constraints and a lack of understanding on my end about how long it takes to create things on the development side.
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Version Control Issues - The version control software that was used in this project ended up costing us the most time overall and is one of the biggest pieces of software that will be important for me to understand completely i the future. The software we were using was Github. I had used this software before when it came to web design, but never had I used it with Unreal Engine. This is something I will not soon forget as I had my level blockout progress erased more than once during the development timeline and countless bugs had to be fixed by taking the dev team away from their work to help solve issues we were having with the software.
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Non-Concrete Narrative - As the game designer I took up the main role to come up with the narrative, partially because my team wanted little to do with the task since they already had their work cut out for them. From the start of the project I had an idea of what the narrative would be for this game, and had laid it out in the GDD. However, over the course of the event, when time started ticking away, and mechanics started to be cut due to time restraints, I started to notice that the narrative no longer made sense with the gameplay we were left with. I think if I had spent even just an hour more time towards the end of the project dedicated to making sure the narrative beats held up along-side the action beats, the project would have faired far better.