Reflecting on our first year of game dev projects
We started Nahar Entertainment in 2019 as a way to make projects that we would love to play, and to improve at our individual crafts. Below is a series of reflections on our first year of making games together, consisting of all of the game jam games we made in 2020.
Negative Construction
Our very first game! I’m especially proud of this one, as it comes with a pretty unique concept that wasn’t hard to execute! Even better yet it’s also our (and my) first Game Jam game! It was inspired by those little parts in games like the Batman Arkham series where you’d have to blow up walls to continue, or destroy other parts of the environment to proceed. The dev process was pretty hectic, as outside of little experimentation and prototyping this was actually our first genuine project together, so it was nice to see it come together so well in the end. This was a submission to the Kindred Community Game Jam, and received an overall score of 19th and an audio rating of 8th. Play it here
Sparks of Light
Our first Ludum Dare game and second game overall! This one was hit or miss. I wasn’t very happy with how the gameplay felt, and how unpolished the game seemed to me. It was an interesting concept though.
I’ve made a post jam version to make sure that the game got the polished version it deserved, however it still isn’t perfect. Considering this was made in 3 days, as well as how difficult it was to execute my original idea, it’s still relatively alright. The team did exceptionally well with art and music, so the faults in the design of the levels and gameplay was all down to me.
Play it here
Post-Jam
Post Jam version of Sparks Of Light, with major tweaks to enemies and the player! I left game dev on the backburner for a while here, so it took a while to get back into it, which is why this version came out over a month after it should’ve.
Enemies were tweaked, and the ‘boss’ enemy type was removed completely, to promote simplicity. The player lost the ‘wide radius’ orbit, as it allowed for players to cheese every level by standing at a distance from all the enemies.
Levels were reworked, and bugs were fixed. Some ‘bugs’ were actually just lazy implementations, such as the mechanic in which you had to kill all enemies to pass, which in reality was just one enemy near the end of the stage which you had to kill to advance, rather than the entire room.
Play it here
Rebind
Rebind was a game we made for GMTKs 2020 game jam.
This was a really fun game to make!! Definitely a better experience than Sparks Of Light! Considering it was a 2 day time frame, the game itself was made a lot better than any other game I have made thus far. The levels were designed especially well, although a bit too tedious at times, and the basic mechanics felt intuitive and easy to understand.
This was a game that received numerous playtest sessions from a large group of people, so we were sure that the levels were designed well and had an ‘aha’ moment that’s key to this kind of game. This was also our first game without CQNPVR, our very talented artist, so the overall experience felt kind of strange.
This game was also our first to reach 100 downloads (thanks to GMTK for playing it on stream), so that was definitely an amazing milestone to experience too! This was the first game we saw to have actual full release potential, and we’re glad that so many people enjoyed playing it. We also ranked in the top 8% overall in the jam, out of nearly 5.3k entries!! (#434nd to be precise.)
Play it here