Weaponized Walkie Talkies?
Hey everyone! Liz here to talk about our 2018 Tiny Phoenix Global Game Jam experience!
The Global Game Jam is a wonderful, non-profit event for game devs sponsored by a handful of companies that play an integral part in the gaming industry. Game devs around the world - amateur and experienced alike - meet at designated jam sites for a weekend. Starting on Friday, they announce the year’s theme that the games should incorporate. Jammers (as they are called) then form small teams and the race begins to create a game from start to finish by Sunday! A total of forty-eight hours of development time is spent during this time. It’s a whirlwind!
Development Time Lapse
This year was our second year participating and we doubled our team size and even solicited child labor. I’m kidding. Mostly. Mike B is a true lover of game development and its processes and attended voluntarily.
Recently, I moved to Los Angeles; however, the rest of the team is still in Phoenix. I worked forever alone, remotely from my apartment the whole weekend.
This year, since I knew what the jam was and what to expect out of the experience, I was able to work with much calmer nerves and focus more on the quality of the game instead of spending the majority of my time trying to keep a lid on my ever-looming anxiety. In my first year participating, I was hysterically nervous about the whole thing for the full 48 hours. When we reached submission time on Sunday, I then realized how healthy and nurturing the attitudes of the hosts and participants really were.
The theme this year was Transmission.
After about an hour and a half of brainstorming, we settled on another multiplayer arena game (we seem to like those). The game consists of four players divided into two teams: a team of alien escapees and a team of determined security guards. The premise of the game is to defeat the opposite team through attacks that are based on the coordination of your weaponized walkie-talkies. Thus spawned the electrifying title: Weaponized Walkie Talkie.
I am amazed at my ability to paint shitty, crayola-drawing textures in less than an hour a pop. GGJ truly brings out the best in me!
Let it be known that I am by no means an animator. My total animation experience amounts to about twelve hours at last year’s game jam trying to figure out Maya’s animation processes, of which no animations actually made it into our game last year because I still couldn’t figure it out by the end. But after about 8 failed animation exports this year, I did it (big props to Mike K. for the ultimate patience wading through all my failed export files). Behold this horrible rig and run-cycle in all it’s layperson glory!
Thanks to some quality lighting effects, environment, and shader work by the programmers we won the Best Art category at our jam site and were awarded some sweet Steam gift cards! Thanks Phoenix Jam Hosts!
See you all next year for GGJ 2019!
A Word From the Coders
Hi peeps! Mike here. I wanted to chime in and say that this was my favorite of the three Game Jams I’ve done. It’s a better experience each time, and if you’re on the fence thinking about it, jump over already!
The programming team came over to my house to work for most of the weekend. My girlfriend, Alex, snagged all the leftovers from her works Pita Jungle catered event. Fueled by unlimited amounts of Pita Jungle, we worked our asses off and when it came time for judging we somehow were sort of ready. Because Liz was working remotely, we had to go demo without her. Here’s a little demo video we made of the gameplay.
Game Demo
People who played really seem to have fun which always the number 1 goal. It’s crazy how close we were to that not happening to be honest. With less than 10 minutes until go time, the game was completely unplayable. We were struggling to finish so much that the game had not been tuned or tested at all! Right before starting we did our best to ballpark the values for health, damage, battery drain/gain, and player speed. Come demo time, we had never even played with 4 controllers! After all that, things actually ended up okay.
Here’s a really great picture that show how far we came in 48 hours.
Convept Art vs Final
Going forward, we might put some more hours into the game, but more importantly we’ll take the skills we gained from this and hop right back into Frank from Earth dev. Expect an update soon!
Lastly here are some links to learn more about Weaponized Walkie Talkies
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