UoP Gamejam 2018
Another June, another University of Portsmouth GameJam. This week saw not only the 10th anniversary event but also the largest gamejam we h...
Another June, another University of Portsmouth GameJam. This week saw not only the 10th anniversary event but also the largest gamejam we have ever done in a single location. Over 130 people took part in 42 teams for a week of game development.
I'll start with the trailer so you can see what we produced.
This year my team consisted of myself and LeeAnn along with Tom Garner who created the music for our game. We entered the week knowing we wanted to create a Gauntlet type game, some type of arcade dungeon crawler which LeeAnn and myself enjoy playing together and that we would use UE4 as its the engine I have the most skill and expertise in. Beyond that we had to wait for the themes to be announced.
Monday morning the event started and the themes were chosen by selecting random articles on Wikipedia. The final articles were David L. Levi, Pallissery and D-Side. (Not my favorite list of themes) We began researching each article and decided that we would still make the gauntlet-like game using the town of Pallissery as our theme. The theme we had chosen interested us mainly from an aesthetic standpoint, we were inspired by the Muslim and Hindu architecture and wanted to make something which was inspired by the shapes, forms and colours of these religions.
We broke down our tasks, LeeAnn collecting reference for characters and creatures ready to inspire her art while I began making some general assets within Unreal. I started by creating a camera building a health and damage system for our character.
During the first day we came up with the theme and basic ideas for the game. You would play as a warrior who has journeyed to a cursed temple. While here you would have to dodge traps and defeat waves of enemies to continue your journey.
Day two saw us get the player character in the game and animated. LeeAnn had modeled it all and done the animations for the movement and attacks, but when exporting this from Maya we found issues with the rig, these were apparent in UE4, 3ds Max and Blender. In the end I quickly re-rigged and animated the character in Blender while LeeAnn started on the enemy and clutter props. I also began building the tileset for the environment and populating the level and created a notes system for us to tell the story.
Our Third day involved the creation of the remaining gameplay systems. The enemy spawners were built in the morning, this is a Blueprint which spawns a series of enemies and blocks the doors until the room has been cleared. New traps including the projectile towers were added to make encounters more interesting and the level progression was implemented, with keys and enemy encounters stopping progress. LeeAnn continued working on assets to detail the game world and also created a series of helmets which were planned as collectibles for the player to find and equip.
The final full day saw the inclusion of a number of quality of life additions: Enemies have health bars above their heads so the player has a visual cue for their combat progress, the soundtrack Tom had created was added to the game, including a menu track, exploration music and combat music. The helmets LeeAnn had created were added to the game as equipment, scattered through the level as collectibles and a menu was built for the inventory. By the end of the day only menus, sound effects and the story notes were missing.
The final morning was a bit crazy, I had a checklist of tasks ranging from adjusting collision in rooms, adding jumping and falling animations, creating the main and pause menus, adding each story node into the game and adding the final collectible helmet. We didn't manage to get sound effects working before we had to build the game but we then packaged the game as an .exe and began the playtesting session.
People enjoyed the game, we had a number of players who completed it from start to finish and one who even hunted down every helmet we had tucked away throughout the world. I was happy to see so many people taking turns to try our game and while we had a few bugs and didn't quite get everything we wanted to into the game (a number of traps were removed from the final version) it was a fantastic week and there we so many quality games produced by everyone at the event. I enjoyed it so much and will absolutely be returning next year!
We broke down our tasks, LeeAnn collecting reference for characters and creatures ready to inspire her art while I began making some general assets within Unreal. I started by creating a camera building a health and damage system for our character.
During the first day we came up with the theme and basic ideas for the game. You would play as a warrior who has journeyed to a cursed temple. While here you would have to dodge traps and defeat waves of enemies to continue your journey.
Day two saw us get the player character in the game and animated. LeeAnn had modeled it all and done the animations for the movement and attacks, but when exporting this from Maya we found issues with the rig, these were apparent in UE4, 3ds Max and Blender. In the end I quickly re-rigged and animated the character in Blender while LeeAnn started on the enemy and clutter props. I also began building the tileset for the environment and populating the level and created a notes system for us to tell the story.
Our Third day involved the creation of the remaining gameplay systems. The enemy spawners were built in the morning, this is a Blueprint which spawns a series of enemies and blocks the doors until the room has been cleared. New traps including the projectile towers were added to make encounters more interesting and the level progression was implemented, with keys and enemy encounters stopping progress. LeeAnn continued working on assets to detail the game world and also created a series of helmets which were planned as collectibles for the player to find and equip.
The final full day saw the inclusion of a number of quality of life additions: Enemies have health bars above their heads so the player has a visual cue for their combat progress, the soundtrack Tom had created was added to the game, including a menu track, exploration music and combat music. The helmets LeeAnn had created were added to the game as equipment, scattered through the level as collectibles and a menu was built for the inventory. By the end of the day only menus, sound effects and the story notes were missing.
The final morning was a bit crazy, I had a checklist of tasks ranging from adjusting collision in rooms, adding jumping and falling animations, creating the main and pause menus, adding each story node into the game and adding the final collectible helmet. We didn't manage to get sound effects working before we had to build the game but we then packaged the game as an .exe and began the playtesting session.
People enjoyed the game, we had a number of players who completed it from start to finish and one who even hunted down every helmet we had tucked away throughout the world. I was happy to see so many people taking turns to try our game and while we had a few bugs and didn't quite get everything we wanted to into the game (a number of traps were removed from the final version) it was a fantastic week and there we so many quality games produced by everyone at the event. I enjoyed it so much and will absolutely be returning next year!
If you would like to download the game there is a link below:
A full breakdown of the week can be found on the itch.io devlog for the game: https://marccook.itch.io/totcl
About the University of Portsmouth Gamejam
The UoP Gamejam (http://gamejam.port.ac.uk/) takes place every year and has 4 days (Monday to Thursday) of 9am-5pm work before a few hours on Friday morning to finish up and package games before every team demos their games to the other participants and industry judges.
Game created by @MarcCook_ and @LeeAnnBella.
Music by @TomAGarner
