https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/mini-mod

Some of my fondest memories are from doing game jams. This weekend was no different.

Friday

My team started the jam with a good 2 hour brainstorm before settling on an idea. We threw around some really out there ideas. One that really sticks out in my memory was using twitter's API to turn the player's twitter followers into zombies who are intent on eating our hero. We eventually settled on a making a game featuring a platforming robot with modular upgrades.

Once we had our idea we split up the work, @riker-greenslade started building the AI for our three enemy types, @tim-six was started writing demo music tracks getting feedback from the team after each iteration, @graham-wiebe started designing beautiful characters, enemies and environments, and I started building our player controller.

Some of @graham-wiebe's concept art from Friday

A Friday texture/shader test on a cube

Saturday

Saturday some assets were starting to show up in game. @graham-wiebe somehow managed to get all of our animations except dashing done on this day plus a ton of custom shader work in Unity and other miscellaneous assets. @riker-greenslade continued powering through a ton of the games core logic, @tim-six continued iterating on our audio, and I continued iterating on the character controller

*A Saturday proof of concept of the rendering pipeline and asset arrangements put together by @graham-wiebe

@graham-wiebe excitedly shared this gif with us on Saturday after completing the walk animation

*A first look at our hero posed as he would appear in game from Saturday

@tim-six also streamed a fair bit on Saturday. Here's a clip of him working on the main track in the game

Tim making music

Sunday

Sunday was a lot of assembling the pieces. @graham-wiebe constructed our animation tree which I connected to our player controller. @riker-greenslade connected menus, added pretty much every condition trigger and pretty much everything else I was going to forget to add. @ratstache who we've worked with in the past was free on Sunday so he dropped in and helped us out with some scripting and testing as well. @tim-six continued working on music and sound effects.

I know, code isn't sexy but this game is as functional as it is in no small part to @riker-greenslade's excellent and fast coding skills so I had to give him a shout out. I don't know why he shared this screen shot with us but it was something he was working on on Sunday

Monday

Monday most of us went back to work. @graham-wiebe, @ratstache, and myself went back to our day jobs. @riker-greenslade and @tim-six luckily had some time available and add some final polish, play testing, and sound effects.

Conclusion

I think we all had a lot of fun. Every time I participate in a game jam I sort of go on withdrawal after. None of us make games for a day job but it's nice to take a few weekends a year and just go nuts. If you made it this far thanks for reading.

Be sure to check out @tim-six's sound cloud

https://soundcloud.com/tim_six

And @graham-wiebe's twitter (he posts cool visual effects stuff he makes there)

https://twitter.com/eavin7

Thanks for contributing to a great game jam everyone!