THE STORY

Oh My Heart was created during 48 hours of 3rd Game Jam Prague session which was part of the international Global Game Jam 2013 event. We participated in previous years and already have experienced what it takes to make a game in such a short time within a small team.

The key to success is to make the game as simple as possible and to use all available tools instead of fun but time consuming game engine programming. Also have some sleep during the first night but work nonstop the day after. Just focus everything to design the gameplay and write as minimum code as possible - it just brings more bugs to fix anyway. But it is always good to have some skilled programmers at your service and which we had - 4 of 5 guys in our team were prepared to all night coding shift. In the end we saved one guy for more interesting job and it was a full-time achievement and level designer.

One of the best decision during the event was a perfect distribution of specific tasks between all members of the team. That way we worked more efficiently in parallel without the need to wait for each other so we didn't waste much of the precious time. Also when making games we learned that graphics is as important as everything else so we teamed up with a friend who did some pixels before, although he qualifies better as a UX designer than an artist for our game graphics. But still better than some grade school art done by a programmer. Because of that we decided on using pixel art style as it looks cool when incorporated in some crazy 2D game. It worked surprisingly well because he is a talented artist with a ability to quickly adapt the different style. He eventually took the initiative in redesigning our original concept of having the castle wall attacked by monsters so after the first hour we were presented a neo-steam punk environment with a container, a green monster and somehow cute imp-like characters. This was completely different from our original idea but when we saw the new one we immediately fell in love with it.

All of the games created for the event must follow the specific theme which was then a simple heart beat sound. We understood that in little bit different way as we associated it with the blood and therefore we added plenty of it. During the process of making the game we came with many ideas which were not in the original concept but some of them were just too good to be left forgotten. That way we introduced now iconic tesla coil, swipe gesture and even some kind of rage bonus. In the end we managed to deliver and present to other Game Jam participants a game with fast and funny gameplay, fresh graphics and even some crazy old school 8-bit music.

We were really happy to see what was done under 48 hours time and how others liked it. Nevertheless it took two of us additional week to polish the game and we actually rewrote from scratch most of the code base because it was such a mess after those two days. This polishing process was as intense as the time during the Game Jam weekend but it paid off greatly. We successfully submitted the game to the Appstore so everybody can give a try and play some hardcore pixel blood stuff.