Clark McAllister

Why did I create this project?

In my spare time I like to participate in game jams. In a game jam, you are given a theme and a certain amount of time to create a game from scratch. This project was created for "The GameDev.tv Game Jam 2023" which had the theme of "Life in 2 dimensions"; the game jam lasted for 10 days between 19/05/2023 to 29/05/2023. I came up with the idea to have the player travel between 2D & 3D worlds as I thought that would be an interesting mechanic plus it would allow me to explore 3D game development, which up to this point, I had minimal experience with. I settled on the idea to have the game be a baking game where the player has to manage their time between both worlds.

I had to solve the problem of how to make the transition seamless. Just changing between a 2D scene & a 3D scene would not work without needing to have a lot of variables tracked between the two scenes, also I do not believe that the transition would have been as smooth as I would have liked. I went with my initial idea of having the whole game being 3D. I achieved the 2D by attaching sprites to 3D game objects. This allowed me to reuse my movement code in both dimensions as well as making the transition seamless because there is no change in scene. This feature did not take that long to implement, however, I believe it really enhanced the game. Due to completing the portal system on the first day of development, this gave me a lot of motivation to keep working on the project and made it one of the games I have enjoyed making the most.

At the end of the jam, their was a rating period where all the participants rate each other's games on different categories. "Portals and Pastries" ranked #13 in the "Theme" category out of over 1000 (at the time that the jam ended).

See the day-by-day development log here.

Instructions

All game instructions can be found on the game page on itch.io. Press "Run Game" or download the Windows version on the game page.