Becoming Bad
Tools Used
-Unity
-Adobe Illustrator
-Clip Studio Paint
GameJam Toolkit 2023
Becoming Bad is a game created during the GameJam Toolkit 2023 event from July 7th at 12pm to July 9th at 12pm. In this event, teams are given 48 hours to create a video game from scratch that follows the theme Role Reversal. What Role Reversal means is the player will be playing in unusual roles outside the norms. Examples they gave are Mario but you play as the Goombas and Koopas, Flappy Bird but you play as the pipes, and Tetris but instead of moving the shapes you move the screen instead. This prompts teams to be creative and think outside the box as they create fun and innovative mechanics to break the norms of the player's role.
In Search for Teammates
One month prior to the GameJam I scouted for teammates across different platforms, connections, instagrams, discord, and even GameJam Toolkit's recruiting forums. As a result, the team consisted of 5 programmers and 3 artists, myself included as an artist. This would be considered a decently sized small team for what we were doing. Unfortunately 1 week before the event, many of my team members had to withdraw from the GameJam due to outside circumstances. Because of this, I was in need of teammates to replace the ones that left. As a result, we recruited 2 new teammates overseas, one from France and the other from England. This left us with 4 programmers and 2 artists.
Let the Games Begin!
With the GameJam underway, we devised a plan to schedule a meeting time that would allow all of us to communicate with the European members and start the pre-production process. We decided to do 2D games since the process should be easier and faster for a small team. We also decided to go with a gameplay where the player will play the level first, and then the player will replay the level but in the perspective of the enemies. Here in the second play through, players will have to attempt to stop their first play through but using the abilities of the enemies. With the french team member being an experienced programmer, I asked him to be in charge of the programming team. On the other side, I was left in charge of the artist team that consisted of me and a friend. Things went fairly smoothly for the first couple of hours with the programmers dividing the workload and the artist splitting the responsibilities into character designs and background design.
Unfortunately, with focus on background and characters, there was no one responsible for the UI visuals nor the miscellaneous art such as collectables and attack particles. To make matters worse, my friend that was in charge of the background was a 3D artist and was heavily advocating to combine 3D backgrounds into a 2D game during the pre-production process. He wanted to create a scene of the level in Blender and take a screenshot of the scene to use as the level's background. This brought up some concerns as to if the 2D art style of the game would clash with the 3D style of the background, especially since the background artist is the youngest member with very limited knowledge in composition and lighting. His level of knowledge is only a little above surface level.
The other issue was the enemy sprites. Since we only decided what the gameplay and mechanics of the game will be, we did not design any of the enemies for the games yet. We have to wait for the programmers to decide what enemies and they’re mechanics are before I can make any of the character designs. This process can take awhile as programmers are unsure if the desired enemy will work as an AI and as a player character. As a result, I had to stay up 2 nights in a row just to draw all of the character’s sprites and be on standby to have the enemy sprite done to avoid the workload piling up.
The final trouble we encountered was during the 2nd night of the project. I met with one of the programmers to help import the sprites from the sprite sheet into the game as animations. This was a long and tedious task but we were able to import all of the sprites. The issue was that after we completed importing, we tried to sync the work into the main project file. Unfortunately the work did not sync properly and the work was lost. Now all that tedious work was lost and we only had about 6 hours left before the deadline to submit our game. Luckily not all progress was lost as I still kept the individual sprite sheets of each character. This made it a bit faster to convert the image into animations.
The End of Our Journey
After a lot of communications, dedications, and communications, as well as some moments of panic, we were able to turn in the game on time and set up the submission page to attract the potential players. Though it was very intense and stressful, GameJam Toolkit 2023 was a fun event to participate in and we learned a lot from each other and the mistakes we made in the project. We aim to participate in next year's GameJam Toolkit event with the goal of entering the top 20 games.
