Jaydn's delightful key art, that somehow incorporates the entire game name

Overview

Climbing Trash to Heaven Before they Close the Door is an arcade game made for the 2024 GMTK Game Jam, following the theme "Built To Scale". It was built from the 16th to the 20th of August 2024 alongside Sylvie Freeman and Jaydn Jones.

I was the programmer, project manager, and contributed to the overall design. Check it out on itch.io!

A screenshot of gameplay: Shelby stares up at an encroaching trasheroid.

Exiled and betrayed, Shelby embarks upon a fruitless quest to heaven.

Climb an endless supply of flaming trashteroids and collect precious gems, in a vain attempt to impress the giants that once banished you.

Production Trial by Fire

This was the first game jam I'd ever participated in! I ended up acting as the group's producer as well as programmer, so it was my responsibility to manage everybody's time, set deadlines and coordinate the team to avoid bottlenecks. I used a huge Kanban board to track everything that needed to be done, and was sure to take regular breaks to maintain my sanity.

A screenshot of my Obsidian Kanban board full of completed nonsense-sounding tasks

This was my first time using Obsidian's Kanban feature for project management, I've used it for every project since.

Designing and Programming at Speed

It was enjoyable to work to a new set of guidelines: instead of trying to make the most polished project possible, I had to work at speed, and design around our limitations. For example, I'd planned to allow the player to jump originally, but I had to consider cutting the feature as it would have taken too long to get right, and the game ended up working much better with a "glide" function instead.

After some testing, I realised that reaching a high point wasn't an interesting enough goal, and simply encouraged players to build a big tower, which wasn't what we imagined during our initial sketching phase. So, I changed the goal to instead be about collecting gems that would appear on alternating sides of the screen, encouraging players to create zig-zagging stacks of blocks, which was a lot more fun.

The blackboard we used for brainstorming.

Our initial brainstorming session. You can see the tetris-stack that would inspire the final game at the bottom!

Reflection

I'm very happy with the game as my first game jam title: I had a great opportunity to work with my friends, and created something that's quite fun to play. Even my dad thought it was pretty good! It was a significant learning opportunity for me too, as I can now see the easy fixes I missed, and how the game could have been even better, if I had taken a few extra breaks and let myself relax a little more.

I was also delighted that the other team members let me keep the name.