This game was developed as part of the WonderJam game jam autumn 2022 edition, which is organized and hosted by students at the University of Quebec At Chicoutimi and supervised by professionals from the gaming industry (such as Ubisoft and Beenox developers).
While participating in the WonderJam event, I participated in the "Arctis Studio" team, which was composed of Léna Herau, Hugo Langlais, Enzo Medina, Pierre-Jean Morel, Marion Trassaert, and myself.
For this year's edition, the theme was the classic "It's not a glitch, it's a feature" with a slight twist. On top of the main theme, each team had three styles to implement to add variety to the games produced during the Jam. For our team, we had received "Turn-based", "Co-op", and "Progression".
In order to fit these specifications, our team came up with the following pitch for the game we would start developing for the next 48 hours :
" The player enters a game that seems to be slightly off, with elements looking glitched and a bit broken. As they progress, levels will even become unsolvable on their own! That is until the main character begins talking to them, and showing them how to "break" the game into being finishable, in exchange for helping them escape from their programming. However, the more they progress together through the levels, the glitches get worse and worse. They must be quick. "
In this game, the player may alternate between the "Platformer" and "Developer" modes. In the default Platformer mode, the player progresses by playing the platformer just as any would, by jumping around the environment in order to collect keys to unlock the door to finish successfully the level. However pieces of the levels will be misplaced, or unusable. In these situations, the player will be able to then switch to the Developer Mode by pressing "A". In this mode, the player will have access to a new interface showing the elements that can be altered in the level: movable platforms, rotating platforms, boxes whose gravity can be inverted, and even colliders that can be toggled on and off. While in this mode, time is stopped for the player, allowing for changes mid-jump for instance.
Example of Platformer Mode gameplay
Example of Developer Mode gameplay
For this project, the Arctis team was split into three sub-teams : the Programmers, the Designers, and the Artists. The programmers, as the name suggests, focused on coding features and mechanics throughout the event in order to produce useable content for the other teams. On the other side, the designers began by coding as well when no content was available yet, then moved on to assembling the various features and building the levels. Finally, the artists were in charge of creating and assembling visual content, effects, and sounds, into a coherent ambiance.
Throughout the Game Jam, each member of the team could change between teams, as long as they told the rest which aspect they were currently working on, to allow for better knowledge of who could be in charge of what, while still allowing for freedom of activity for everyone.
In my case, I spent the vast majority of the event as an Artist, alongside Léna Hérau. We worked together on bringing everyone's vision of the game together, and I believe we can both be proud of the pieces we managed to produce.
The first challenge we faced in this project was to make sure the art style of our creations for this game would fit together. Since we both had medium experience with pixel art creation, we had to iterate a few times to come up with features to focus on to have a coherent style throughout the game.
Design iteration examples for the character and boxes
In the image shown above, we can see six iterations of the character design I was in charge of making. Before the first iteration on the left, we had already been through multiple ideas before settling on this concept but it didn't fit into the decor and Léna's creations. Therefore, I had to take this model and add small modifications each time to make it feel like it was a part of the world it would be moving through. The saturation of colors, level of detail, the strength of shadows, all of these parameters were tweaked in order to come up with the following design :
Final Animated design of the character
As clearly shown in the above GIF, the main character had to be animated as well, in order to integrate into the game correctly. In order to accomplish that, I made use of the Animation component of the Krita software (which I use for all my visual creations). This required a new set of skills from me, as I had little experience in correct pixel art animations, and I needed as well to be able to have the same character recognizable as viewed from the side.
In the end, I had to create four different sprite sheet animations for this character: Idle, Walking, Jumping, and Falling.
GIF animations of the character
Once these assets were finished, the team had enough visual elements to complete the Game Jam version of the game. This Jam was supervised by professional developers, as stated earlier, which meant that a week after the event ended, a public live stream was organized to show the work of each team and let the jury reveal their decisions.
Our team was lucky enough to be awarded first place in the contest, with special congratulations from the jury, as well as the public's choice award, which was an incredible honor to everyone on the team.
However, we weren't going to stop there yet. As this game was made over the course of only two days, we firmly believed that we could improve on the experience and make it a more enjoyable game overall. Because of that, we kept on working on the project over the following weeks: we added levels, improved the decor, removed many (unwanted) glitches, and added visual effects to create a better ambiance.
This experience was incredibly fulfilling and motivating to me, as it was my first ever official Game Jam. Working under time constraints and with specific guidelines towards a defined goal proved to be extremely stimulating to me. I got to challenge myself creatively, push ideas from start to finish, and see how our team could get together to create a complete project from scratch. After this event, I really want to participate in more game jams and keep challenging myself in future new projects.
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