This past weekend I participated in the 10th edition of the Future Game Developer's Jam. It's a jam organized by the university I graduated from. My college buddies and I have always been fond of this jams and have been participating, organizing even, in most of these jams so we decided to join this new virtual edition of the event.  

The way it worked was to develop a game based on a theme that was going to be release at 6 PM Central Time. After that we had until Sunday at 1 PM to our game's build and media files to a google drive folder. We would have a small presentation of our games and then a series of judge each game based on certain specifications given by the organizers. 

The Setting

One of the things I love about participating in game jams is the opportunity I get of learning and exploring new skills and areas. One of my goals in this game jam was to learn the basics of Clayxels, a sculpture base modeling Unity plugin. So, with that in mind I set up to do most of the projects' 3D modeling. I've been using Unity for a few years now and have always been impressed with how many things you can do with one software. In past game jams I gained a bit of experiences using Probuilder to model inside Unity. I wanted to use this experience to model as many inorganic objects that the game required and complement it with Clayxels for more organic items. This was my plan and my goal for this weekend.

Something we all agreed is that we wanted to make a game and have fun developing it without getting in each other schedules. So, on a google drive document we established our active times to see when we would be available throughout the weekend. 

Getting The Ingredients Ready

The theme was Apocalypse. Right off it was a theme we didn't know if we liked at first taking all that's happening in the world. One of the things I love about working with my friends is that they come up with the most ridiculous and fun things to do. This was no exception. I wasn't able to get an early take on the brainstorming because I was still working when they started, but they came up with a really peculiar and ridiculous idea. Awakalipsis. To those of you who don't know spanish, it's sort of word play of the word Apocalipsis and Avocado in spanish. Pretty straight forward. 

The concept of the game was that you were a healthy avocado trying to become guacamole while a group of rotten  avocados tried to make you turn bad. All of this while looking for the guacamole's ingredients and evading the series of obstacles found in the kitchen. The goal was simple, there wasn't as many assets needed so we thought it was doable. 

We started prototyping and blocking the level but it was a bit slow since most of us were only able to work on this till late at night on Friday. More so, a couple of devs had to go to bed early to be able to wake up to work the next morning. We decided to call it a day early that day to be able to wake up with a fresher look on our idea the next day. 

On my side I had just started getting used to clayxels. I did my first version of the avocado and it was a complete mess. It took me a few tries to understand the workflow of using booleans to model in 3D. But once I did my 5th try at the avocado I was more comfortable with the result and with my knowledge of the tool. So I went to bed quite comfortable with my progress. It was a fine looking avocado.

Choppin' Up The Portions

The next day was kind of a chaotic experience. A couple of the devs from the team were gonna be busy until late at night. So that left only three of us being able to work on the game throughout the day. That was okay until we realized how much work we still had to do to get to having a minimum viable product with the assets we had been working on. 

To me most of my Saturday was spent blocking the level in which the avocado was going to run and creating and finding references for the ingredients needed for the guacamole. I would be lying if I said I didn't miss some good ol' guacamole with nachos and pico de gallo. After a few hours, and half a dozen tries on making a lemon, I was finally ready to start modelling the kitchen appliances and counters!

Mixing Up The Ingredients

People don't tell you how relaxing it is to create 3D assets and to see them integrate to your level when working on game dev. People won't also tell you that you shouldn't spend too much time on making a stove when you still have the rest of the kitchen to go through and less than a day to go. Lucky for me I ended up  i m p r o v i s i n g. To save up time and energy I ended up using parts of the kitchen like the counters and the closets to make other things like the island in the middle of the kitchen or the  sink. 

While I was working on the kitchen we already had a test site with just cubes and spheres on how the level was going to be. Alain and Moi did most of the art integration while I was still working on the assets. Mauler and Cesar had other stuff to do and ended up not being able to work the rest of the day. So, it was up to us to integrate and finish what they did with what we had. We worked all through the night but at like 1 AM on Sunday we were finally ready to finish integrating the remaining assets! That's when we had to finish the rest of the game. That god darn 10 percent left to polish and finish the game. The one 10 percent that takes the rest 90 percent of the work. 

Prepping The Portions

From 1 AM until two hours before the deadline, we worked, and worked, and worked on making the avocado stay still. This last almost 10 hours were spend fixing the most little and subtle things that would annoy the crap out of us and that made the game not feel as good as it should. This part of development is the most tedious and rewarding part at the same time. While you might feel like a god when you fix a bug that had been haunting you all night, you will also feel like a dumbass when that fix breaks ten more things. So in game jams imagine that feeling amplified to the tenth power because you also have the time pressure and the little sleep on your shoulders. 

We spend several hours managing on fixing some physics problems with the new character controller we implemented. We didn't realize it had taken so long until I started listening to the birds sing. It was finally morning again. We took the decision to go to bed for a few hours and come back a little less stressed to finish and prepare the last bits of the game. I was reluctant on doing so because I was already done with the project and already wanted to be over with. So I stayed and worked on it for a few more hours to get as much as I could ready. Big mistake. I should've gone to bed since the work I did on those hours was close to none because I was so tired and burnout about the game. I went and had breakfast and waited for my friends to wake up. There wasn't much left to do so I felt a little better about it. 

When they woke up we worked together in a video call to get things done. There was actually not many things left to do so we finished a couple hours before the deadline. That's when we started messing about adding more content to the game, and that's when most of us lost it. 

Enjoy The Meal

One of the things I have always loved about making games is adding personal touches that would bring joy to the people who developed the game. With this game in particular we added the last picture we had of us before the pandemic happened as an easter egg. It was also the last picture of us before I moved to Colombia. At first I thought it was something really funny and goofy, but as we kept developing we kept adding more and more references to inside jokes we had from when we were in college. It was a really nice experience to share with friends things we missed about us and things we still had even though we were so far away from each other. 

So, we added this easter egg in which if you shoot the picture of us you will get 20 seconds from "It's Raining Tacos" while tacos particles fall around the room and a small dog dances in the middle of the kitchen. That was the song we chose as graduation song. We hated it. But at the same it brought us so much laughter and joy just remembering how awful it was to have chosen that as a graduation song. 

The Aftertaste

I guess what I am trying to say with all of this is that making games can be tough. It can be something that will be stressful, that will take a lot of our energy and resources. But when you are making games with your friends just for the sake of making games really amazing things can happen. After all, adding this easter egg of a picture of some friends from before the pandemic in a game about being in an apocalypse being an avocado made us feel a little bit closer to each other. Games can surely change a lot of things and it's always best when the things they change are inside us.

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