Two weeks ago, I participated in a BUas wide Game Jam. I wasn't sure what to expect and didn't have team formed aside from Alex and I, but we soon found a group of talented artists and designers (well, designer, singular) to work with.

The theme of the jam was "Out of Reach" and the brainstorming and pitching was one of my favorite parts of the whole process. We ended up landing on a central game mechanic of "stretchy arms", and a theme of a funky wizard tower to climb. We also really liked the idea of making the game cooperative.

Then we had about 3 and a half days to implement our idea.

4 out of 7 of our team members were artists, so the game ended up looking amazing. Just the environment art alone of the bottom floor is enough for a portfolio piece, and on top of that, we had great prop design, rigging, animations, 2D art assets, lighting, just-- *chef's kiss*. And yet through it all, the silly, cartoony aesthetic persisted. Exactly what we wanted.

Meanwhile, the other 3 of us focused mostly on design (or gameplay programming? it overlaps quite a bit in a blueprint-only project). Jay handled the character and input, as well procedural room generation, Alex worked on the extending arms as well as UI design, and I myself spent an entire day trying to get local multiplayer to work (admittedly shouldn't have taken that long, but I was new to this aspect of Unreal), connected the arms to the player, and made the camera system. It then took me another day to try to fix collisions for the hands (that was so ad-hoc and finicky...)

In the end, I think we delivered nicely. We showed off our demo in front of the class and there was much laughing and silliness. We spent an additional week after the game jam polishing up some of the worst jankiness that made it less fun to play. Maybe there'll still be some update in the future, but we're confident enough now that we would like to release a "final" version.

I very much enjoyed working on this project with everyone else. It was fun to see it all come together and I'm proud of the final product. The controls may be a little hard at first, but the gameplay is so much fun. While there were some hurdles for me personally, and I spent longer than I would've wanted on specific issues in Unreal, I think this also gained me some valuable experience, and has prepared me better for future projects. If nothing else, next time I run into local multiplayer in Unreal I can look back at this project and break my brain over it a little bit less :)

This was only my second ever game jam, and I can't wait for the next one! (maybe GGJ again in a month or two?)