Rush to Riches is a game developed in 10 days for the Goed Game Jam #14. Before the game jam started, I wanted to see if there was anyone looking for a team. I had been wanting to try teaming in a game jam for some time now because I thought it could be a cool experience and take a little of the load off me. As I was searching, I found a post by thehotdogman saying he was looking for a partner and that he could make music. I messaged him and he was happy to team up with me. 

Once the theme “Everything is a Resource” was announced, we immediately started to discuss game ideas. The idea we landed on was a game where the player would have to pick up objects around a city and sell them to earn money. The player would have to explore to learn shortcuts and techniques which would allow them to earn the money in under 60 seconds (later changed to 3 minutes). I immediately got to work on the game, and Hotdog got to work on the music.

I learned how to do a lot of things during this jam, one of which was y-sorting. Y-sorting is a fancy term for the game automatically displaying things that are below an object on top, and things above an object behind. For example, there is a player and a tree. If the player moves above the tree, they need to be displayed behind the tree, giving the appearance of being behind the tree. If the player moves below the tree, the player should be displayed above the tree, giving the appearance of being in-front of the tree. I ran into a few issues while learning this, but I eventually overcame them.

About halfway through the jam, progress was going great, but there was an issue that was becoming too big to ignore. Performance. The game revolves around the player being able to pick up nearly any object in the city, so the city needed to be jam packed with objects. This large amount of objects was becoming too much for the game to handle all at once. The frame rate quickly dropped to an unplayable 20 FPS. No one would want to play the game at 20 FPS, so I had to do something. It took me a while but I came up with a clever work around. Instead of having all 200+ objects being rendered at the same time, there would be a stockpile of just 35 objects. The game would calculate the 35 closest objects to the player (Each object's place is marked by a “marker” node and holds the data for position and which type of object it is), then the game would distribute each object in the stockpile to one of those markers. When the player moves, objects that are too far away teleport to markers that are closer to the player. Because of the now limited number of objects in the world, I had to make sure that the screen could never contain more than 35 objects, otherwise players would see objects disappear and reappear. This forced me to delete many markers in the city, but I still feel like there is a good amount of total markers. My performance problem was finally over! If you were wondering why the city map darkens the screen and hides all the objects in the world, now you know why! (Because I could only display 35 objects at a time!)

About this time I got the music from Hotdog. He did an amazing job! The main song was made so that it gets more intense as the game progresses, which adds a great sense of urgency and stress to the player as they realize they are running out of time! I’m so glad Hotdog and I were able to team up, he did a great job on the music and we had fun working together!

On the last day of the jam, I felt really confident while I was adding the final polish to the game. I was playtesting the game when I noticed something was wrong. In the last 3 seconds of the game, the music would suddenly cut out and it would ruin the stressful ending to the song. I would like to point out that this is in no way the fault of Hotdog, it was something going wrong with the game engine. This is not something I could have gone without fixing, as the final stress of a round was one of my favorite parts of the game. I scrambled to figure out what was going wrong and tried multiple things to fix it. In my last effort, I tried to add extra silence to the end of the song, hoping that the game engine would cut out 3 seconds of silence instead of the song, and it worked!

Overall, this whole experience has been really great! This is my first time working with a partner, and Hotdog’s first time doing a game jam. I am really happy with the way our game came and I hope everyone who played it had fun!