Game Jam | 2024
For this project, I got the chance to take part in some Game Jams
GAME JAM #1 (Dylan, Dasha, Drew and Me)
For the first game for a game jam, the theme was “Spreading” After a lot of planning these were the ideas we came up with
Spreading the Sneezing
Spreading the beat (Final idea)
Spread butter on toast
Zombie Apocalypse
Spreading the cure
Spreading out
Tick in dog hair
For this game, we decided to spread the beat. Based around a guy with a saxophone spreading happiness with his music in a gloomy town. Aesthetic-wise we wanted to achieve a Jazz pop art style, dragging inspiration from some scenes in the animated film “Princess and the Frog”, having everything super minimalistic and simple.
For this project, I wanted to improve more on my coding, background art and animations. So I was tasked to do those things specifically to go down my own path and experiment.
Mechanic Coding part 1
The thing that I worked on in this group game jam project is a mechanic I wanted to apply to my capstone project. I'm not strong at coding, so I wanted to at least try and code a new mechanic I wanted to create
I gained a lot of inspiration from the game Alice Madness Returns. Alice madness returns has a lot of interesting mechanics but one that stood out to me was the magic platform mechanic. Following the memorable story of Alice in wonderland, Alice drinks a “drink me” potion, allowing her to shrink whenever she pleases. But doing this in Alice madness returns allows the player to see any alternative pathways to explore different parts of the world, or obtain items. I like this game mechanic as I've never seen it before and it blends well with the theme of the game. I thought it was a really fun and cleaver mechanic, and this is something I'd like to apply to my own work
What I needed to create is to make a #C script on unity - when I press the left control button on my keyboard, I want a square sprite to appear, but when I release the left control button I want to square sprite to disappear.
For a starter I created a code where when you press the left control button, it destroys an object that a player cant see to reveal the square. The code that I made didn't work the way I wanted as every time I pressed the control button, the square kept cloning itself and not disappearing.
Mechanic Coding part 1
I watched More YouTube tutorials such as…
How to make Object appear when "e" pressed in Unity by Gussin
Unity C# press key to instantiate and destroy GameObject by Arshel Tutorials
C# Instantiate & Destroy a GameObject - Unity Tutorial by Forbidden Tree
And with those tutorials, online help pages and help for peers I managed to make my final code!
Basically meaning… (When the control button is clicked - show square - if else - don't show square) and it worked! So now if you click and hold the control button down the square will appear on screen. And when you release the control button the square would disappear. When i finished this code, I gave it to my other group member to have a look at it and to incorporate into the game.
I'm very happy with how this mechanic turned out. Even though I'm not the strongest at coding I'm super proud of myself for learning how to make this mechanic inspired by Alice Madness Returns happen. And as a result of me learning this new mechanic, I can now apply this to my own Capstone game.
Background Art
The next thing I worked on for this project is backgrounds and how to make the background fit the theme well, without it looking strange or out of place, so I want to practice ensuring that the background suits the foreground, the character and the theme.
I had a look at the group members artwork that they had already done for this game jam I looked at the style and the colour's they used, so I had an idea as to what I needed to create for the background. I also looked into the our inspiration and looked and what the background looked like. I noticed that the backgrounds were super simple, with not much going on to let the main character or design to be shown clearly. So I didn't want to make the background overly detailed to take away from the main game.
With that knowledge I created the backgrounds from the game. The first test I created the backgrounds, I thought it looked to simplistic and boring it didn't have any character to it and it wasn't visually interesting at all. The group also wanted to have a gloomy background to suit the gloomy city the game will take place.
The next test I was quite happy with how it turned out. as I feel the background is way more visually interesting and suits the game way more than the other test.
Transition Animation
Another small thing I did was create a transition animation as I wanted to get better at animation to be prepared for my capstone project, as I was needing to create a lot of different animations for different parts of my game.
I needed to create a animation that will transition the games world from an old and gloomy one to a fun and happy one. So once the player enters the sad gloomy town the player will spam the spacebar, the transitional animation will play and the world will be different.
This was a very last minute addition to the game so I didn't have a lot of time to do this. So I got online reference for this animation, as I wasn’t sure how to approach this animation, as animation isn’t my strength.
I found this animation online, I imported this animation into procreate to see all the frames I needed to create. After creating all of the frames needed, I increased the frame rate to 42 frames, and duplicated each frame 3 times to make the animation a little more smoother.
GAME JAM #1 FINAL REFLECTION
Overall i'm really happy with what i've learnt with this Game Jam project. The things i've learnt are…
Coding on a magic platform mechanic
Background and how to make the background fit the overall theme
Transition Animation
Learning how to code this little part of the game was really helpful for the progression of my capstone project. I'm not the best coder and I find it hard to understand code, but from watching youtube tutorials online help pages and help for peers I managed to make my final code and it worked and I was really happy with myself that it worked.
When it came to creating the background, I found it slightly difficult to create a background to fit Dasha and Drews art work, as their designs were very specific, and I really wanted all of the design elements to fit well together within the scene, so I looked really hard at Dasha and Drews work, so I can achieve a similar design.
Final Game Jam #1
GAME JAM #2 (Dylan, Dasha, Drew and Me)
For the first game for Game Jam the theme is UI, UX and juice and these was the different ideas we had
fidget screen
Pause screen
Pimple popper
Start screen
Menu screen/inventory
We ultimately decided to do a pause/start screen to work on our UI and pause screen design.
Me and Dylan were tasked to do the design aspect of this UI. Dylan was the planner, he created mood boards consisting of game influences and examples, and he drew up some sketches to help me create the final design.
PLANNING - ME + DYLAN
Dylan made a mood board and I made some sketches for my personal UI design, as well as colour pallets we could use to create the final design.
The main thing that we were influenced by was little nightmares, Limbo and Lethal Company as we liked the simplicity of the font and the overall design relating to the game. But we also really liked UI in game such as The Sims 4, roblox , minecraft and Mario Kart having a box pop up to clearly show the game has been paused. We wanted to have good UI layout that could emphasise responsive design principles, looking at different screen and button sizes to ensure a good user experience and overall clear visual communication.
So we wanted to create a pause screen that has both simple UI design while still having good theming that relates to the game, and making it bold and clear to have a good visual communication and user experience. So a good balance between visually interesting and clear and understandable. We decided to do 2 different UI designs and choose a final one in the end.
WHAT I CREATED!!
Dylan made a mood board and I made some sketches for my personal UI design, as well as colour pallets we could use to create the final design.
The main thing that we were influenced by was little nightmares, Limbo and Lethal Company as we liked the simplicity of the font and the overall design relating to the game. But we also really liked UI in game such as The Sims 4, Roblox , Minecraft and Mario Kart having a box pop up to clearly show the game has been paused. We wanted to have good UI layout that could emphasize responsive design principles, looking at different screen and button sizes to ensure a good user experience and overall clear visual communication.
So we wanted to create a pause screen that has both simple UI design while still having good theming that relates to the game, and making it bold and clear to have a good visual communication and user experience. So a good balance between visually interesting and clear and understandable. We decided to do 2 different UI designs and choose a final one in the end.
GAME JAM #2 FINAL REFLECTION
Overall i'm really happy with what i've learnt with the second Game Jam project. As I have learnt how to create clear visual communication in design and understanding the importance of it.
The only thing that was a bit of a shame, was that we ran out of time to apply the UI design to the final Game Jam. It would of been cool to see the final Game Jam with the cool visuals. But overall i'm ecstatic with what i've learnt and what i've created for this Game Jam. This project has helped me with my capstone project, as I’m wanting to focus more on design and visuals so looking more into UI design and looking at other games as an example was very inspirational for me.