Draculad was created for the 3-day long Mini Jam #118 on itch.io (Play it here!) by a team comprised of myself and two of my peers.
Mini Jam #118 is a game jam where designers must abide by a 3 day time limit given a theme and a unique "limitation" that the game must follow. Teams must find a way to make the theme and limitation work together in some form during gameplay. The theme for Mini Jam #118 was "vampire", while the limitation was "blood must be lethal". My team consisted of myself, an artist, and a sound designer.
I was the sole programmer and lead UX designer for the project. I scripted the game from scratch, was the sole contributor in-editor, and made various and necessary tweaks to the systems of the game according to UX design. Since this game jam was a time crunch, that meant establishing a quick and efficient feedback loop between playtests and work in-engine to deliver as polished of a product as possible given the time frame.
The first major problem we encountered was scope; our initial design for the game was much more grand than our allotted time period allowed, and although my team's game ideas were great, I was solely responsible for being the one to cut the project down to a manageable size for this submission. My teammates had spend a sizeable chunk of their time working on assets that were never used, while all of my time had to go into completely refactoring our core gameplay concepts into what was basically a bite-sized chunk of what we had designed for.
Mini Jam #118 had a 5 day judging period where the game was given ratings by game jam officials and the community that had submitted projects. Out of the 150 submissions made by other game jam entrants, Draculad placed #9 in overall score, landing the submission in the top 10 for the jam.