S.H.O.D.I.M.E

A Godot project for the Fall 2024 GADIG Jamfest

S.H.O.D.I.M.E. was my Godot project created in just one week for my first in-person game jam. I was the producer for a team of 6 people, two of which I had worked with before (Max and Nathan). The theme was "New Perspectives" and Max had a great idea involving using a separate window to recreate a thermal camera effect.

My Role and What I Learned

This project went very well, I got to get more experience focusing on the production of a game. Everyone contributed to the game's design and idea, and we could all work together in person for most of the Jam. 

The biggest issue we ran into during production was when switching scene to scene there was a roughly 30% chance the game would just crash. Max discovered this bug Saturday night after we'd all gone home for the night (I think I was already asleep by this time) and proceeded into the night spending a few hours testing, to no avail. 

Now I know that Max is a great programmer and problem solver so when I heard that he ran into this issue and couldn't find even an error related to it I took a look at his code to see if I was seeing anything he wasn't and decided it was time to table it. At this point, in the Jam we had around 6 hours until it was time to submit and call it a day and we still had multiple important features and functionality to add. 

Despite the game-breaking nature of this bug, it would have soaked up the rest of our time until the deadline and we would've had to ship a very unfinished product that we weren't happy with. I told Max and the team this and they all agreed and we moved on to finishing the level implementation, coin collection, and polishing. 

This ended up being a very crucial decision that saved the Jam for us as the bug never got fixed (even when Max went back for a few days after the Jam and tried to figure it out) and we shipped a game that we were all very happy with. When we presented we were even lucky enough that we got through the entire game without a single crash. I learned a lot about how to manage a team, incorporate different viewpoints, say no to team members, and even a little bit of Trello.