GREAT to hear 
Team name: Intiger
Team members:
woeavatar, William Bustamante
granjalf, Juan Murillo
All original assets: NO, it is a patchwork of example, original, and scavenged assets, shame on us
STEAMPUNK RANGERS: Because outdated heros never die, even with old technology and back problems, they replace their missing brother in arms and take reins of their colossal robot switching controls.
Control the remaining rangers inside a giant robot to use the weapons and jump controls to destroy as many enemies as possible.
Has some bugs, but we are still very proud of it, and most of all, it was a blast
Link: https://onedrive.live/redir?resid=9A5CCBFBF2C59C92!1147&authkey=!AMopcgN8AB4X7jE&ithint=file%2Crar
We have made a video to our game. Can i edit our submission post to add it?
Ending my playthrough stream early, need to get some sleep, ~24hour consecutive stream is hard to do, taking an 8 hour break. Will resume playthrough stream at 2PM PST. Only developer requested games have been played, so if you have not seen your game played and requested it yourself, it has not been played yet by me on my stream.
://.twitch.tv/awesomeallar
Great job ! You are really tough.
Hats off!
Hussars, this was a fantastic game you put together. Really good work.
Some UNOFFICIAL statistics based solely on my interpretation of data from this thread.
Teams entered the contest: 284 (may be a bit off as I didn’t manage to grab the most recent list before it was replaced with the list of finishing teams, still should be close enough)
Breakdown by members count:
Teams with just 1 member: 131
Teams with 2 members: 52
Teams with 3 members: 32
Teams with 4 members: 28
Teams with 5 members: 41
That makes 4 members per team the least common and 1 members per team the most common, seconded by 2 members per team.
Now to the finishing teams. Total number of teams that finished the contest is 190.
Breakdown by members count:
Finishing teams with just 1 member: 87
Finishing teams with 2 members: 29
Finishing teams with 3 members: 21
Finishing teams with 4 members: 21
Finishing teams with 5 members: 32
That gives us the following data: 67% of all teams have finished the contest.
66% of all 1 member teams have finished the contest which is pretty close to total percentage of finishing teams.
Just 55% of 2 members teams have finished, being by far the least effective member count.
66% of 3 members teams have finished the contest, also pretty close to average.
75% of 4 members teams have finished, which is significantly above average, also remember that 4 members per team was the least common team configuration among entering teams.
78% of 5 members teams have finished the contest, being by far the most effective team configuration.
is all the data in table form if you prefer that to my mumblings:
members entered finished % finished
1 131 87 0.6641221374
2 52 29 0.5576923077
3 32 21 0.65625
4 28 21 0.75
5 41 32 0.7804878049
total 284 190 0.6690140845
Now some interpretation by me, may be totally wrong. Apparently the more members you have in your team the better your chances to finish your project (who would have thought), except two members, you are far better off alone than with one other person. Probably it is because in two members team there is no apparent leader and has their own idea of things and there is no one to tip the scales to either side.
Teams with more members are probably more prepared and take things more seriously, after all the effort they took to put their teams together they wouldn’t want to just give up half way. Percentage of finishing 1 person teams is almost exactly the same as total percentage of finishing teams, so being alone is ok, but if you truly want to have an advantage then grab some extra manpower. Also those numbers should probably be weighted because there are much more 1 member teams than any other member count so all of the above may not mean anything.
@VRLtqq: That is interesting … because it goes completely against Brooks’ Law
Extract from a book I am reading:
Weird. 8-}
Well, maybe member count didn’t change development time, we all had the same amount of time to complete our projects. Just seems to be more likely for more people to actually finish their project, regardless of how long it takes.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get my project ready for the jam. The new rules made it more difficult especially being a one man team. Hopefully I can participate next month.
I think you have to look at the quality rather than completion in this case. It’s crazy what some people managed to build on their own in just a few days. Some of those one member submissions hold up very well if you put them next to even five member games. I don’t mean to downplay the results of larger teams of course, there’s some amazing stuff all across the board!
And managing a team and putting’s work together is a job on its own after all - Literally!
I don’t think it’s that bizarre in this case because you are talking about really compressed timeframes, small teams and disparate areas of expertise. Even the classic laws of physics break down at extremely small scales (game jam theme reference +1)
In my case, working independently, I put in about two days on art assets. If that portion wasn’t on my plate, I could have done sound fx or voices (my game shipped with neither) and some more bug fixes. With such an immediate deadline, I know of a few people who didn’t complete their games because of showstopping bugs or things they couldn’t resolve.
Now, if my team had been me, a 3D artist, and a sound engineer, adding people wouldn’t have reduced the development time, it probably would have just resulted in a more polished product.
Anyways, great stats.
How so? If anything, it was easier with the full week to work with.
I’m curious about his statement as well. This was my first foray into Epic’s Game Jams, and I found nothing in the rules that would imply any kind of hindrance to just jumping right in…
Thankfully, this time around I actually managed to produce a playable game… My first and only previous Game Jam experience a few years ago, not hosted by Epic, resulted in something so god-awful that it made E.T. look like Contra… Suffice to say, it looked terrible, was unplayable, and made me cringe that it had my name affiliated with it(Our programmer was not very good…)…
This time at least, going solo, I managed to make something that not only looked half decent, but played relatively well on my crappy laptop, and was pretty fun once all the mechanics and enemy types (that I had time to make) are fully introduced in the 4th and final level. At least by my play testing… Couldn’t get anyone else to test it for me before submitting it, and only have my laptop to test with at present…
I think Eugenestrickbag was referring to the rule for “no 3rd party content” (except Marketplace; which is available to). Since a 1-person team would presumably have to perform all the roles in the team (code, design, art, etc).
And a multi-person team could divide the areas of specialty among them.
This is a week old now, but I just wanted to give my two cents, since I fear this issue may re-surface in the next Epic Game Jam:
Things like fun, experience, and learning something about yourself will happen, regardless. We’re all game developers for such reasons, so “fun” and “experience” are rather a moot point.
Those aren’t the only things that validate one’s purpose in participating in game jams. No matter how much fun and experience you seek, you’re still forced to weigh how you participate, since you’re still spending the most precious limited resource a human being has: Time.
Not who enters a game jam can spend time the same way as another. Some people can spend 18 hours a day; others, 2-3 hours a day. So much in life pulls your time in different directions, but you still may wish to tackle a game jam, so sometimes you may want to be reasonably resourceful. (Emphasis on reasonably.)
Maybe I have only 2 hours a day to work and I’d rather be spending time creating my game’s intriguing gameplay mechanics than re-creating some rocks from scratch. What’s a few pre-made rocks and there, reused from some other project? How is it “cheating” when it’s still all my creation being involved?
Or maybe I’m a programmer who can model environments well enough but can’t model a human soldier to save my life, and so I openly acknowledge that I’m using a couple of pre-made soldier assets, just to keep from mucking up my great game with my own ugly models. Naturally, I won’t be winning any prizes for asset design, but it’ll be my game design overall that matters.
I understand the prestige and preference of stuff created from scratch–we all admire it. But since there’s no little way to always “prove” what is and isn’t “scratch”-made (we can only assume), and since this is Epic Games’ house and they’re allowing Marketplace assets in these jams, I think a little acceptance of using our own pre-made libraries is in order.
If one is transparent about how they’re using a pre-made asset (posting WIPs is great for this), and the pre-made assets play only a minor role in their games, they’d still be fulfilling the “spirit” . If we’re worried about those who may create assets for the game jam ahead of the start time, then I’d suggest we just don’t announce the game jam so far in advance.
Also, you say that we’re simulating the pressure of a deadline. These game jams aren’t simulations of game dev deadlines–they’re personal time trials. These game jams do not reflect a real-world situation, where resourcefulness is the top priority. These are unique challenges of personal achievement.
And finally, I’ve seen a lot of talk in this forum about a “proper” game jam. What is proper but the rules? If the game came with rules and prizes, then it’s only the host who determines what is “proper.” There’s nothing to justify the arbitrary sentiment of “No true Scotsman uses pre-made assets.” The rules determine the “spirit.”
If one’s that high on such a pure “spirit” of a game jam, perhaps they shouldn’t even join one where there are high prizes involved, since, traditionally, game jams generally don’t even offer such great prizes–they’re generally done for the sake of free participation. But again, one’s “spirit” of a game jam is all dependent solely on the one’s purpose for the jam, whether as host or as participant.
By the way, in music jam sessions, they’re impromptu performances, but most musicians’ improvisation is zoning around turn-to familiar scales, often times revisiting some little riff or melody they’ve played around with in private, and it all resurfaces on-the-fly. Even jam sessions are products of using one’s own library. 
There’s nothing in the rules preventing you from using 3rd party content, or a couple of rocks you modeled for another project. I’m really not seeing the problem.
A ‘problem’ might be building a project or large components of a project well ahead of time and submitting it. Those submissions are usually glaringly obvious and rarely win, as far as I can tell. The prizes are secondary to the act of actually building a game within the constraints. The fun bit comes from creating whole cloth under the time pressure, and doing a crapload of prep work defeats that purpose – but only insofar as you cheat yourself out of the fun experience.
I mean, if you spend 20-40 hours on a game – even working $10/hr you could buy all prizes for yourself.
I joined up because I’ve been reading about UE4 for months but somehow haven’t started my first game yet. This game jam was a great opportunity to provide me an external structure and have fun applying myself.
In the end I didn’t end up submitting my game. I wasn’t even close to finished. But I don’t think I could have recreated the experience of the last 7 days on my own! So I’m really happy I tried to participate.
I’ve gained so much more perspective on making a game because of the motivation this contest provided!
So I counted up the various file sharing sites used in the submission thread:
-----------------------------------------------------
78 | .google / docs.google
67 | dropbox / dl.dropboxusercontent
10 | onedrive.live / 1drv.ms
7 | mega.nz
6 | / name.
2 | 4shared
1 | filedropper
1 | mediafire
1 | sendspace
-----------------------------------------------------
173 | TOTAL LINES
And I started a thread under “General Discussion”:
Large file sharing: a question about your upload / download experiences.
Cheers!
I’ve learned Rigging + Animating in Blender and importing those into Unreal Engine during this Game Jam. So I call that a win already!
I’m also happy that I finally finished something :).