Game Jam

Introduction - The Game Jam was an event that took place over the weekend of the 25th of March, which started at 10am on Friday. We were put into randomly assigned groups, with students from other courses from TUD. The task was to create a language learning game that was due on Sunday night. 

Team - My team consisted of Niamh Germaine, Jakub Polanowski and John Gilman. Niamh was a student in Game Design, Jakub was studying German, and John is a Creative Digital Media student. 

Niamh volunteered to code and build the game in Unity because of her experience as a fourth-year Game Design student. Jakub provided all the translations in the game. I planned out the aesthetic and art direction for the game and provided the artwork. 

Organization and planning - We all joined a call and got to know each other after the main Game Jam and started to come up with ideas for the game. We started off talking about a Temple Run style game that would have used German controls instead of arrows, which forces the user to learn what each one means. The next idea we came up with was a dodging game using numbered tiles, which is the idea we ended up sticking with. 

Process/ Production - I was responsible for visualizing the ideas, the artwork, and prototyping. I started off by basing my designs off of the early sketches done by Niamh. These are the original sketches, which helped us to visualize the idea of the game. 

This was an early Illustrator version of this sketch that I did up to flesh out the idea.

This was then the final version of this artwork/ prototype that I came up.

For inspiration, I used the game Colour Switch, along with a few other mobile games such as Dumb Ways To Die. These screenshots of my final prototype would be almost identical to what Niamh would code and build in Unity. 

We also knew we needed a character to be able to move to each tile to avoid the bombs, so I gave the character a Bavarian style outfit, and for the other languages in the game, I designed either traditional outfits or stereotypical clothes, such as a leprechaun for Irish. There weren't any challenges with my work it just took a lot of time and a lot of redesigns to get it to a place where I thought it looked visually appealing. 

Lessons learned - I really enjoyed the Game Jam, I'm not sure if it was the fact I didn't work for the weekend, which I have been doing for the last 8/9 months, but I liked being able to focus on one single project instead of juggling multiple things at once. It was really cool to be able to get put into a group with strangers too and be able to work so well together.