ABK Jam Team 7 Devlog — Part I
[November 29, 2023]
The first game jam I’ve been with Studio Jojo was generally a very good experience to get a sense of working with an international multi-discipline team. We learnt how to deal with time zone difference, game development workflow and communications with people who has different work paces.
After that working as a Back End Engineer at Froglet Games.
Well, this is the end of 2023, might as well do something game development related in a rapid session. Why not another game jam to call it a day before the holiday season?
Activision Blizzard’s Veteran Employee Resource Group just so happened holding a holiday themed game jam beginning on December 2.
The hosts of the jam was responsible for organizing team for the participants. Everyone gets assigned to a random team. Surprisingly each team has roughly ten people with their unique talents initially assigned.
Unity recommended for the jam, because there are coaches and mentors who are specialized in the engine. As much as wanting to switch to Unreal, Unity is a the Swiss Knife for game jams.
A Pleasant Surprise
I’m assigned to Team 7 and we’ve got three weeks to finish the game. Of course, it would be great to introduce our team compositions.
Shawn — Producer, Level Designer
Moly — Environmental Architect (Level Designer in another word)
Echo — Generalist Programmer
Jon — Programmer, 3D Modeler
Lulu — 2D Artist, Illustrator
Milton — Software Engineer
Mondae — Product Manager, Technical Designer, Programmer
Sara — Concept Artist, Narrative Designer
Andre — Concept Artist, UI/UX Designer
Unfortunately there was one team member who was not able to join. Alas, each discipline has more than one member in it, which means we can rely on each other to cover our backs, just in case.
Game Design Brainstorm
The first week was done in pretty good fashion. The day before the jam we were already started to collect game design ideas. These are really good ones, I do hop we could have more time together to try some of them. However time is short, we only had the bandwidth to make one.
- You play as Santa trying to find the Xmas gifts that the elves hid from you. You must find the gifts and deliver them to the children.
- You play as an elf that has left the gate open and all the reindeer have escaped to play in the woods. Goal is to track down candy and get the reindeer back into their beds before Santa discovers they’re missing (lol this sounds more like a children’s book than a game as I write this :P. Maybe it can spawn some ideas)
- XD so.. Stick with me on this.. you play as the next gen fighter/assault sleigh that disperses free presents to all the kids and the enemy is the corporate toy company trying to stop you. Can have a silly undertone such as the evil toy company shoots ornaments at you or “off brand” candy. Lol oh my it’s late, time for bed ;P
- 3 Goblin siblings are tired of finding coal in their stockings on Christmas, they want to be on the nice list this year! Ride down the mountain in a sleigh, picking up as many missing presents that fell out of Santa’s sleigh as you can. Avoid debris and trees! If you make it down the mountain, you return the presents and win.
- Welcome to the Order of E.L.F. As a new recruit to ELF, your main goal is to hone your craft as a recruit while gathering intel on your first assignment [insert child name here]. Using stealth mechanics, and ELF magic abilities, you must gather intel on your target to build the perfect Christmas list for their desires. Be vigilant and decisive, we never said which list your target belongs on. The stakes are high as you only have 1 day, Christmas Eve, to gather enough information to make that final decision and get a list back to Santa or Krampus before the Holiday starts
- A thoughtful game that questions Christmas as a tradition.
- A group of children’s gingerbread creations come to life. You play as a gingerbread dinosaur, traveling through the level and trying to survive amongst the other gingerbread creations.
Eventually we settled down with The Order of E.L.F, which was an excellent and detailed demonstration of the game design. I have a weak spot for Immersive Sims, the game mechanics proposed is right up my alley.
Setting up git repository, assigning collaborators, game design meetup, responsibilities and roles clarification. This time everything happened in a rapid fashion. The flow of the team started really good.
Off To A Great Start
Engineering wise while Mondae was able to knock out most of NPC AI and navmesh with really good assets, My tasks were more indexed on programming:
- Basic player movement
- World state control logic
- Count down time for the mission
Having someone who can do tasks within engineering does feel much more relieved. The challenges of course, number one initially was more about how the team would work together and how to divide up our work. Which was an unnecessary concern, since most of us were harboring high autonomy.
The next challenge would be to familiar myself with first-person player movement. It was something I’ve never done before. I’m sure as hell played a lot of first-person perspective games, there’s a formula in me knowing what kind of first-person movement feels like. However, to implement it would be a totally different thing.
Luckily this is a short game jam, Unity packages and plugins with open source licenses are allowed. We don’t have to re-invent the wheel, a brilliant Sweden developer Hertzole is extending his excellent first-person framework for the community. Check his work out, I’m amazed by his professional coding style and well structured architectures. With some tweaking in the script, player movement turned out to be better than expected.
Level design prototype, 3D model and UI designs are in progress. It will be very likely we will have a relatively polished short game for holiday season.
There are no better blessings than having people share the same passion for game development and working together to make things happen.
See you in the next Devlog :)
