One Final Minute | JWilliams Design

An entry for Epic MegaJam 2021 using the theme "Running Out of Space"

Engine : Unreal Engine with Blueprints

Role: Solo Designer and Developer

Time: August 2021

Overview

One Final Minute is a top-down, timed survival game in which the player fends off a wave of zombies that have infiltrated the compound. Each zombie defeated leaves a permanent pool of acid. As these pools pile up, the player literally finds themselves running out of space.

The player character is a regular Joe with a gun and unlimited ammo.

Zombies vary in shape, size, and speed. Slow-moving crawlers and normal speed upright zombies are easy to kill if spotted soon enough. A challenge lies in the heavy zombies who carry a large piece of metal as a shield. Heavy zombies start with a slow movement speed, but once the shield is broken they charge the player. Acid pools also have various sizes based on the zombie from which they come from.

Sadly, the game did not place for any prizes. However, the satisfaction of concepting, developing, and uploading a game before the deadline was a great enough prize in itself.

Game Jam History

I have always used game jams as an accurate measurement of my skills as a game developer.

My very first jam was the 2019 Epic MegaJam, and it was a total disaster. The theme was "Down to Earth", so I envisioned a mothership descending onto Earth while the player controlled a little alien rover robot (similar to Mars rovers) which had been captured and held in a secure facility. The gameplay was to guide the robot and escape the facility while along the way messing with systems in the facility to help the mothership such as scrambling radar and communications and calling off fighter jets.

The scope was way way too massive for my skill level at the time, especially with only a week to work with. The night before the deadline I didn't even have a playable level. It was then that I learned valuable lessons about scope and assessing my own skills. While extremely discouraged and disappointed in myself for not even submitting, I took the learning experience to heart.

My next game jam, MegaJam 2020, I fared much better. The theme this year was "It's been a long time, but we're not done yet". The project created was a first-person shooter, set in an underground tomb of sorts. Beginning in the medieval era, the player is armed with a crossbow and must defeat a demon who can manipulate time. Causing enough damage to the demon caused him to spawn a portal and escape the room. The player then entered the portal and is sent to the future to face the demon again, this time in the modern day. Armed with a modern assault rifle the fight begins again until the demon escapes once more to the future. The third area was much the same as the first two, except this time the player has a laser rifle.

The concept used the theme in two different parts. "It's been a long time" referred to the time jumping to the future from a medieval era, while "we're not done yet" referred to the boss fight that was spread out over the centuries.

While this project was, for the most part, completed before the deadline, I still managed to just miss it due to poor upload speeds.

Then came MegaJam 2021, which you see here. I can confidently and proudly say "One Final Minute" is the culmination of 3 years of dedication, lessons learned, and a willingness to not give up. Not only did I concept, design, and develop the project with plenty of time to upload it to Itch (I set a personal deadline of the night before the actual deadline), I also managed to complete this while working a day job for 40 hours that week.

To look back at where I was during that first MegaJam, I can see myself that I have grown by leaps and bounds in my development skills since then.