baby steps: my first game jam
So in February of 2022, some friends and I (totaling to a group of four people) took part in the Brackey’s “It’s Not Real” game jam. Prior to February but also at the same time I was studying game design and game programming because I’m interested in becoming an indie game developer as a career. Incredibly surprising, I know. Now that it’s April, I’ve had some time to sit on this project and reflect on it in between sessions of my first Bloodborne playthrough. Having thought about it for about a month, I’d like to write down what I’ve been thinking and share the story of how my friends and I made a fever dream of a game. For starters, let me say that my knowledge of C# was and still is pretty timid to say the least and two of my friends didn’t know how to work with Unity. To cut some time, here’s how my friends and I structured the group to fit our skills:
- Guillaume — The French Canadian who knows the most about programming as was his job so he was decided to handle all of the code along with the Unity project. Oh I only wished that I was good enough at programming so that I could’ve helped him for what was coming.
- William — Another French Canadian who’s a professional musician and the resident audiophile of the friend group. He was the obvious choice to be tasked with sound design and creating music.
- Pedro — A creative Brazilian artist who was brought onto the project a day or two into the jam. Pedro draws more than any of us so we asked him to creating the art for characters and splash art for the main menu and lose screen.
- Me — Some sleep deprived American university student who was trying to complete a 3D platforming game for an accelerated class alongside the jam. Though since I have years of experience with Photoshop and creative writing, I helped by creating all of the environment art, most of the dialogue, in-game UI art, and item sprites.
The jam lasted for a week, from February 20th until the 27th at 6:00 AM EST. In that week, we worked for about maybe four days total. It went mostly smoothly, Guillaume’s free time was basically dedicated to this game and he created a cool system for how the game interacted with the environment via raycasts (I don’t know how it works or if I’m even right in how I just briefly explained it. All I remember is him saying something about raycasts and the environment). William went crazy with the sound design and gave us an entire library of sounds to choose from while also creating a very nice tune that fits our game’s theme. Pedro created some very gnarly and interesting characters, my personal favorite is a cyborg goblin with eight legs. Lastly I pulled through my studies and was able to provide some psychedelic environments with a unique (albeit hard to look at) art style. Our game looked pretty great, we were proud of it and still are. Then Guillaume’s computer crashed.
It was four hours before the submission deadline.
The Unity project didn’t save everything.
Guillaume had to restart it all.
Though that was not only the worst part of the jam but also the beginning of our problems. We had to scrap an entire room, remake the ending, change quests, remove interactions. We had to take our game and downgrade it. Some examples of things not included in the game are: the headless basement guy’s quest, a riddle puzzle, and a custom cursor (which I made some pretty cool cursor sprites for). Not only did this catastrophe happen but I had actually forgotten to create art for an entire room as well as sprites for the player’s inventory and phone which acted as a timer. I had to also create new sprites for items to accommodate quest changes and new sprites for furniture since we realized some rooms looked too similar. Pedro also quickly drew up a main menu during this time since we had forgotten about the main menu as a group. It was the most stressful four hours we endured that week, possibly even that month and contender for “most stressful event of the year award.” With my art assets completed I sent them to Guillaume, wished him luck, and then went to bed. I can’t even imagine what he went through having to not only rewrite code for game systems & mechanics but also to re-add all of the sounds, music, and art and make sure they work how they’re supposed to. In the end, Guillaume clutched up after all the crunch and submitted the game two minutes and thirty-four seconds before the deadline.
This is our game, Quaalude Adventure, a point-and-click adventure/puzzle game where you have to endure the stress of hiding your quaaludes from the cops before they arrive to your house. Guillaume and I had the idea thought up in our minds due to our love for two videos: PilotRedSun’s Not So Fast in which we wanted to replicate the stress & anxiety of the situation and Mike Caracciolo’s incredibly funny quaaludes bit which we adored the absurdity of. So with the two core ideas being a stressful objective taking place in a crazy world we were set. Being that I was assigned to creating the environment or basically the entire world, I blatantly took inspiration from of my favorite games: Cruelty Squad. I wanted a veneer of bright colors that laid atop a brutal world with ugly monsters. A psychedelic fever dream of anxiety. Pedro created some mean-looking dudes, enough to show that the world isn’t kind or normal at least. I decided to go with a surreal art style where I took pictures of real life objects, applied a LOT of filters to them, then layered an odd texture above the asset, and then pixelated the whole image to add some crunchy style to it. In the end it’s ugly, nightmarish, and I love it.
Above is the sprite I made for a locker. It was originally grey-blue but with some adjustments its now a disgusting green. The odd texture I mentioned that I add onto sprites is to add a dream-logic sort of look. In this image, I overlayed a texture of ground beef because I thought it would be nasty. How would you even imagine this locker would feel when touched in person before I told you it was made of meat?
Here’s my personal favorite sprite of the game. I call this guy “Jorg.” The above image is an unpixelated sprite to get a better idea of the overlaying and filters I apply before the final mosaic pixellation filter. So the reason this dude is my favorite asset that I created is because of how well all these different elements came together. First is a normal wooden door, nothing special, but then I came up with the idea of making a speaking door. I wanted a terrifying but also sickly creature that was possibly in pain. After deciding the color saturation and hue after the different brightness/contrast, exposure, and polarization layers, I decided to try giving the door a melted wax look. It was a great idea because it now looks warped and in a way ancient as hell. I then took an elephant eye, duplicated and mirror it, merged the two eyes into one weird two pupil eye, and stared proudly. The elephant’s wrinkles add onto the melted wax’s effects. Lastly, I got a picture of myself that my friend uses as an inside joke for the mouth and nostrils. Overall I think I made a really cool looking door which not only fits into the fever dream aesthetic but also the anxiety theme we were going for.
Okay okay, this is the last image I’ll talk a bit in depth about. Here is a view of looking into the kitchen from the living room. I tried my best to create depth by skewing some parts of the green wall for the hole and honestly I think it doesn’t look half bad. Here you can see how there’s another room that offers a fridge and sink to investigate. The fridge was overlayed with skin, the walls have an edited marble overlayed onto them, and the floor is an abstract drawing I made overlayed by wooden planks.
So how did our game fair after the trial and error, the tears and sweat? Not that well but better than I expected. With our ugly art style, janky mechanics due to a crash, and no hand holding, our game only appealed to those who liked weird games. I expected that much but did not expect our ratings to be as low as they were since a lot of the comments were very positive, reading off as if they somehow had loved our clunky baby. Our highest median rating was a 3.2/5 for theme which was followed by a 2.7/5 for innovation. Our two lowest median ratings were a 2.1/5 for game design and 2.2/5 for fun. Our overall rating was exactly 2.484/5, placing us #934 out of 1640 other submissions. The ratings don’t get me down, our placement actually happily surprised me to see our game be placed in the top #1000. I didn’t expect for us to create the next groundbreaking Half-Life or indie-mega-hit Undertale. What I did was the foolish thing of wishfully thinking to not score as low as a 2.1 while also submitting a janky and ugly game. Overall I think that the game jam was a neat exercise in group game dev for me to experience and gave me the smallest bit of preparation for receiving criticism or low review scores.
Prior to this jam, I had created three simple games for a class on my own and created two board games with peers for another class. I learned that if anything, I shouldn’t do a game jam while juggling school as a full-time student and a freelance video editor. Game dev takes a ton of logistical workarounds (especially with larger projects and working with groups) but it also takes a LOT of time, basically the entirety of my limited free time with how my life is currently. Maybe once I’m out of university I could strive more for that dream of creating sick ass games, but as of right now I don’t think it’s reasonably feasible. Trust me, I have lists upon lists of game ideas to tackle if I ever get the chance to do so. Creativity isn’t a problem. The issue is that I lack the mindset for creating games at this moment, programming knowledge, but most importantly the time to invest into even attempting game dev. Time is an important resource in everything we do: racing against deadlines for school assignments, completing work at reasonably fast speeds, fitting in time for relationships into our schedules, etc etc. With studying, editing YouTube videos for a streamer, and figuring out life as a young adult all taking up most of my plate, game-developer-me will have to wait and see if the summer offers any opportunities to get to work on one of my many ideas.
