Zachary Baptiste - Game Design
Game Name
Endless Dreams
Engine
Unreal Engine 5.3
Dates
March 9 2025
Game created within 24 hours with a team of 3 others as part of Full Sail's Hall of Fame 15 Game Jam. Game had to match the theme of "Follow the Dream". The game is an endless runner where the player runs through multiple dream worlds, switching to 3 lanes to navigate obstacles and collect coins.
Gameplay Images
Gameplay Demo
Post-Mortem
What Went Right:
01
Scope – With the very limited development time of this game, I was happy we didn't overscope and were able to submit a finished product on time.
Game Jam Experience – Overall, for my first game jam it was a great and informative experience and I feel our team did a good job of alleviating stress and making sure one person wasn't getting too burnt out in the crunch.
02
03
Lane Swapping– I was happy with the overall functionality of the player character lane swapping mechanics. It fulfilled the design task that my team asked of me and after some playtesting and tweaking, we had a more polished lane swapping mechanic to avoid obstacles.
Research – I was able to first effectively research how to implement the lane swapping mechanic into our player character and game. I was also able to then help out in researching and getting our character animation blueprint working again, both of these research tasks resulted in successes.
04
05
Version Control Usage – Besides the initial troubleshooting of the version control, I feel our team communicated and worked well together on the project. The few changes we had to rollback were minimal and easily redone. It didn't feel like there were much times where someone was forced to sit around while others were working on the project.
What Went Wrong:
01
Miscommunication – We had some miscommunication with our teammate gathering assets and it resulted in needing to cut one dream world we had designed as it didn't work with our procedural generation.
New Version Control – There were a couple of times our team lost progress due to being unfamiliar with Github. This resulted in us being forced to roll back some changes and early on we had to make a new repository.
02
03
Starting out – I felt our team had a really slow start, in part due to our inexperience and maybe just lack of confidence with game jams. It took several hours to get our project uploaded into the repository and properly shared.
Playtesting – Although short on time, I feel we may have benefitted from more playtesting. I remember near the end seeing our player's movements not exactly lining up with obstacles and lanes. The player's obstacles and coins could've been better lined up with playesting.
04
05
Team Brainstorm– This may not necessarily have been a negative, but we didn't spend too much time as a team brainstorming on the theme. I felt we kind of settled on an idea and started to run with it. We may have benefitted from maybe asking "what if's?" about our game idea.