Global Game Jam

Last weekend I took part in the 48 hour Global Game Jam.

This is the second game jam I've taken part in and I've found they are a fantastic opportunity to work on artistic areas outside my comfort zone and thus improve skills I'm lacking in.  Animation is an area I really struggle with so I jumped at the opportunity to flex my character animation muscles some more during GGJ!

My awesome team Blank Canvas (formally Richard & The Nigellas) hard at work.

First off I'll talk about our general process.  

The theme was "What do we do now?" which initially left us thinking up ideas for a strategic survival game inspired by Don't Starve however after much serious discussion we realised it didn't sound fun and decided to kill it.  We then came up with various hide and seek inspired ideas but couldn't really think of ways to add meat to the gameplay so we killed those off too.  By midnight we were all starting to flag and debated going down the "interactive narrative route" however after an hour of discussion decided that was also too boring.  At 1 AM things took a pretty dark turn after someone brought up the idea of kids and imaginary friends and someone else yelled something about an imaginary friend being the dead friend of the kid.  

That's when we came up with the concept for "Revenant" - a short, local multiplayer puzzle platformer game where one player plays as a little girl searching for her friend down an abandoned mine shaft and the other plays as the ghost of a little boy she meets there.  The girl character can shine her torch on objects to allow the ghost character to interact with them and the ghost character can interact with "ghost objects" to bring them in to the real world for the girl to use.  After solving a puzzle in the game players will discover the body of the little boy's ghost and the screen will fade to black as the text "What do we do now?" appears.  Yeah, things got pretty grim.  

With the clock ticking and the team deciding we wanted our main characters to be children, I showed the guys my concepts for the little brother character for my honours game.  They really liked the style so I decided to go for similar proportions but with the flat textured art style that myself and Stuart, our other artist, like to go on about so much whenever we do game jams. 

I didn't bother with any silhouettes or any of the other techniques I usually employ in my character design process and just went ahead and churned out the designs.  I'm pretty pleased with how they came out considering.  (However I did add a penguin silhouette to the little girl's dungarees, a little Easter Egg from our last game jam game Gentoo.)

In this idle animation the blink is way too fast and I got careless with certain frames (the accidental brush mark on her legs around the time she blinks.) It's also just generally too static and could benefit from overlapping action such as a nervous hand twitch or a subtle turn of the head.

The animation here is super janky in this walk cycle.  The hair bobs/flicks too late (it should be bobbing up at her shortest point and down for when she reaches her tallest point) and it could do with a couple more in-betweens to smooth in out.

The ghost boy's idle suffers from the same issues as the little girl's.

And in his walk cycle he appears to changes sizes slightly in a couple frames as does his horizontal position.  This was the result of careless Photoshop work on my part.  Next time I'll take better care (and also not animate after just a couple hours sleep I spose.)  Atleast the actual motion of his legs came out a lot smoother than the girl character.

I also worked on a couple animations for climbing and turning cogs however they were the result of just a couple clunky last minute frames so I won't bother critiquing them here.  However you can see them in action in the following video of gameplay footage:

Despite their flaws, working on these animations has left me feeling much more confident about working on the character animation for my honours project.  I recently completed the first pass animation for my main character (which I'll make a post about soon) and I now have a better understanding of how to improve upon it for the 2nd pass.  For instance I was having issues with how far apart the highest and lowest points of the character's gait should be space and experimenting with these animations during the jam has helped me determine the correct heights.

All in all, the game jam was a fantastic experience and I'm really proud of what we achieved in such a short amount of time.  Can't wait for the next one!

Click here to download our game!