The Unreal MegaJam 2018 Success and GameTextures Honorable Mentions
In the Game Dev community you would be hard pressed to find any event that tested your abilities more than a game jam. You dive in blind, lucky if you even have a theme to guide you and then you create a full prototype in an extremely limited time. You do them solo, you do them as a team and the important part is that you just jump in and throw your skills together in whatever way you can to create.
On top of being a test, the restrictions have a way of bringing the devs creativity so strongly to the fore. You bring your craziest ideas to the table because the idea is not scalability, it is to see if you can make anything out of it.
The unreal MegaJam took place late 2018 and it had an absolutely phenomenal showing. GameTextures had the honor of taking part via our free materials and when it came to sponsoring the rewards!
The winners of the Jam all received 6 month subscriptions, including all team members if they had one. We also included 10 one month subscriptions for the Livestream raffle winners as well.
For this article I went and took a look at some of the raffle winners, the ones that agreed beforehand and were open to the idea. We are fully on board with getting creators the exposure they need and we think their work is worth showing.
If you like these, make sure you follow them or support them however you can! We all know how life can be on the dev side and I think supporting others in our community is the best way to make us all stronger as a whole.
The idea was to make a game where the player was doing tests on quantum mechanics with a specialized machine. After activating it something went wrong and his house would be in a quantum lock. The rooms, windows, and objects would change when not observed due to quantum mechanics until the player would have to fix the machine causing it.
This game was relatively incomplete but I find the idea of it to be fascinating.
Moving between the rooms could be jarring, for instance the amount of toilets that began to appear in the dining room was troubling on the best of days.
I would love to see this sort of game expand and grow with some polish and the mechanics that the creator wanted from the start.
The first honorable mention we see is by David Kanekanian. He is a student at Cardiff High School Sixth Form and in his spare time he does game programming and 3D modelling. He enjoys finding new and interesting ways to tackle challenges, and exploring a range of programs and workflows, to enhance his game making skills
He has taken part in game jams on his own and as part of a team with 10 games from these with his name in the credits. You can always find them on his Itch.io!
Check out his portfolio here:
https://dave22153.itch.io/
https://biszop.itch.io/glitchphobia
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Apply_Damage
The next game is called Glitchphobia and comes from the team ApplyDamage!
Immerse yourself into unstable reality. In order to get out you must exploit glitches in a world around you. You can be sure of one thing, any rules you have known no longer exist!
Do you have a courage to dip in it?
The game was an absolutely fun little experiment in mind melting. I loved it.
Less a game and more just a weird experience where there are things about it that are game like.I enjoyed the section where your controls totally break down and then the area right past that where you were unable to progress through the room, which goes absolutely dark and you have to travel through it by your memory of the room alone.
It’s a cool game that also shows a clever use of volumes and drastic shifts in perspective.
The ApplyDamage team is four talented developers that came from a varied set of backgrounds, some of them have worked on projects in the past and it shows in their work as far as I am concerned.
Krystian Komisarek was one of there coders for the game and has been a “game mechanic” and rendering geek for the last ten years, spinning spells with the magic of 3D visuals.
He has worked on the Real Boxing and Godfire projects over at Vivid games and is currently working at Flying Wild Hog where he worked on Shadow Warrior 2, check it out!
You should also check out some of his other work, being a madman and presumably never sleeping he also is working on his own engine and has released two mobile games, Litron and Stare for your life VR and also works on his own shaders that you can check out at his site, Imaginary Blend.
The next member of the team has been learning 3D work since 2006 at the medium rare age of 15. Jakub Janik worked on short animations and game mods to cut his teeth and was part of a group that was working on modifying the Gothic game called “Soulfire”. Working on Asset creation, world design and animations on that lead him to eventually work for a company called i3d and then onto Flying Wild Hog as a Technical Animator involved with character rigging and tool scripting. Fo Glitchphobia he worked primarily as the teams Animator.
My animation reel from 2016:
Lukasz Purcelewski was the teams other programmer and has been focused on gameplay and AI since the beginning. Bringing things to life with his programming was for him an epiphany moment that programming was art for him and combining his work with other artists in a game would bring him an immense amount of satisfaction.
“I could create worlds and breathe life into thinking beings. That kind of godhood experience, (one) that comes wtih great joy and satisfaction was my driving for for almost ten years”
-Lukasz
He has worked on projects large and small, finding his name on credits for games like Real Boxing and Godfire at Vivid Games as well as Shadow Warrior 2 over at Flying Wild Hog. He continues to work at Flying Wild Hog today, experimenting with game mechanics and working on UE4 Marketplace projects and a mobile game of his own design called Space Truck Orbit.
To round out the team we have Justyna Leszczyńska, the primary artist for Glitchphobia.
Check out their Artstation!
A six year and counting professional 3D graphic artist, she spent years working on her art in a traditional sense before shifting into high gear and propelling her into high profile projects.
The 3D programs she delved into would help paint the world around her in an entirely new light, opening up whole new perspectives for her to transform into art. Her work at Techland and Flying Wild Hog have enabled her to meet great people and showcase great art.
When not on a project, she enjoys taking on challenges that expand her horizons even more.
The next game is called Reality Shift by Justin Bowen
Reality has shifted.
A catastrophic event has split the Universe apart.
A series of experiments have been created to fix the inaccuracy of our reality.
Sync up with the alternate reality and pass through the portal in each experiment.
Save our Universe.
Reality shift is a great little puzzler, the mechanics show a lot of promise and I could see any number of cool art styles being applied to this in the future.
The gameplay was fun, most of it was just pushing boxes but the shifting in and out of the different realities added a cool dynamic to it.
With close to 8 years working in games for the mobile industry, Justin has had the opportunity to work on a number top mobile games and in a wide range of fields inside the industry.
Joining the game industry after finishing his Bachelor of Animation in Brisbane, Australia, Justin created trailers for top mobile games including Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride at Halfbrick Studios and ran a small team as Media Director to support Halfbrick with all its video marketing needs including trailers, development diaries, project pitch materials, in-house learning materials, to video ads for UA campaigns along with creating video marketing campaigns and running UA campaigns.
During this time Justin found his passion in creating games in his spare time learned to develop in Unreal Engine 4 and Unity.
He now works on a game development team full-time at Halfbrick and worked on a number of products including Halfbrick’s AR thriller Shadows as a game art generalist/technical artist while working on his own personal projects outside of work in his spare time using Unreal Engine.
Forlorn, www.forlorngame.com, is a passion project inspired by Justin’s favorite game series, The Legend of Zelda and Dark Souls.
It is a chapter based open world action RPG where each chapter released will expand its world.
Forlorn is an ongoing passion project that has been in development on and off in Justin’s spare time since mid-2016.
Justin released his first indie game Squeezy Cube, www.squeezycube.com, developed in UE4 on both Google Play and the App Store on iOS in late 2018. Squeezy Cube was originally an entry for the 2018 UE4 Spring Jam.
The cutesy art style takes its inspiration from platformers like Mario and Kirby and it has a number of lovable, cute, cube animal characters.
Reality Shift, www.realityshiftgame.com is Justin’s next planned game release. He is looking to spend 2019 learning the ins and outs that go along with developing and releasing a game for PC and Consoles.
You can follow the development here as well as keeping an eye on all of his other projects!
Twitter: @shift_reality
Instagram: @realityshiftgame
You can follow him directly here:
Twitter: @justinsbowen
Instagram: @justinscottbowen
These great games and more came out of 2018 MegaJam
Remember this the next time you see a game jam on the horizon, Unreal runs at least 4 a year and there are plenty of other friends in the industry that do so. The last Virtus Game Jam had some great games. The Global Game Jam was huge this year as well.
So grab your tablet, warm up your typing hands and spend a couple of days feverishly pushing out your ideas and see where it takes you!
