More info about my work

This was my first time participating in a game jam, and I wanted to see what I could achieve designing a game alone in the 48 hours of the event. I only knew I wanted to use Unreal Engine 4 as I had been experimenting with it in my spare time and was confident in my abilities with it. At the start of the GMTK Game Jam 2020, the theme was revealed to be "Out of Control".

After spending the first hours thinking about the different possibilities, I decided to work on a stealth oriented real time tactics game, but with the twist being that your agents can decide by themselves to rush ennemies if you don't give them orders frequently enough.
The first evening ended with the base implementation for the gameplay using Blueprint, with its top down view and multiple characters you can select and then order to move around.

During the next day I worked on the key mechanic of the game, the agents deciding by themselves to attack the nearest enemy when their "impatience" gets high enough, and iterated on the base gameplay to further refine the game design and improve the overall player experience.
I also worked on the enemies AI so that they could attack player characters and also had a patrol behavior I could easily tweak from a level design perspective.
In parallel, I also had to prepare some basic assets for the environment and the mechanics, and also two characters for player agents and enemies, going for something as simple as possible given the time constraints (no animation at all on these for example).

Now that the game had all the base ingredients working more or less ok, the last day was when I focused more on the level design, finishing all the content needed while trying to balance the difficulty.
I also fixed the bugs I could encounter and tried to "polish" the experience at least a little bit, mostly working on the UI and gameplay feedbacks.

Although I did a couple of stupid mistakes near the end, like removing the main feedback for the agents impatience or forgetting to double check everything was ok with a QWERTY keyboard, I'm happy with the final result!
I probably was too ambitious with the game and there were clearly tons of better games designed during this game jam, but I finished with something representative of my intentions within the time constraint and had a lot of fun working on this.

The game itch.io page: https://squintik.itch.io/restless-agents
A video I did to showcase the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwQG8bsjr2g
The game jam submission page and results: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2020/rate/699178