Let's get braggy!

Game Jams can always seem like an uphill battle, but sometimes there are the small victories that motivate us to push past the setbacks, and finally complete something despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

One such small victory for our game Serial Dater was our random character generator. Given the fact that our game revolved around the concept of speed-dating, and seeing as many suitors as possible, it was crucial for us to be able to provide a sense of variety between all of the characters. After all, if the same 5 models kept showing up, things would have gotten boring pretty fast. One important way that a game is able to pique someone's interest is through the element of surprise...

...And how could you NOT be surprised when being greeted by a face like this?

Instead of making a bunch of unique character models, we drew up a handful of body features, organized them into folders, and randomly pulled from them every time we wanted to generate a new character. When all was said and done, this was all the code we needed to get it to work:

This tiny little script allowed us to create 8.4 MILLION UNIQUE CHARACTER MODELS!

And while actually drawing the assets took a pretty significant amount of time, coding it up took no more than an hour. We're pretty proud of the end result, because it pretty much means that whenever you see a date for the first time, that's likely the ONLY time anyone's EVER seen that specific character combination! Once you say DATE or PASS, that character model is gone forever...Pretty neat!

If you'd like to see the extent to which we get loony with our character creator, you can check out Serial Dater on our game page here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/serial-dater

How about you guys? Is there anything in particular in your games that you're super proud of, or took a lot of work that might go unnoticed?

A wise man once said: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

So use this opportunity to brag about something specific that you worked really hard on! :)