We ranked 12th!!!!

Hi! I've never done one of these, but I do blog about my gamedev stuff or art stuff all the time.

I've never done a game jam before, and taking part in this one was suuuch a cool experience!

Out of 100 submissions, we ranked 12th!

I just wanted to talk a little bit about what my process was, what I learned, and how I'll do this kind of thing in the future!

First, let's start with the game design!

I was the artist, but because it was a small team, I obviously had a lot of involvement in the initial idea, and because I was making the art, and we were starting from scratch, once we came up with our interpretation of the theme "Never Give Up," the first thing we decided on was what to focus on.

I encourage my teammates, both programmers, to consider what they might want to play with or try out, and specifically, I referenced something I learned about Nintendo years ago... When they created Mario, they focused on the one mechanic of jumping. They made Jump Man and then made an entire game franchise based on that. 

I thought taking the jam from this perspective was a good idea. Let's focus on one mechanic, and run with it. One of our members mentioned wanting to play with the size of our subject changing. We knew the main idea would be 2D because I couldn't work quickly in 3D yet. That same member from before also wanted to play with slowing down time. We came up with an endless runner, where if we hit obstacles, the size of the subject would change. I proposed a lost puppy trying to find his way home, I thought we could make his belly bigger if he ate too much, and he would need to fit through a hole in a fence to win. One of the team members suggested instead a Chibi Girl, and thus, Chronically Amber was born.

The idea of a girl running through the internet trying to survive social media. Being prone to big-headedness or sensitive to mean comments would give us two ways to lose, and one way to win, and if we didn't add a tutorial, it would be hard from the get-go. With our concept in tow, I got to work. I played a big role in the game's direction from this point on. Making sure we didn't deviate too far from the scope of what was decided. There were a couple of times I had to kind of reiterate how the mechanics worked together because neither of my teammates knew a huge amount of English. We were a very international team.

First I started on the character design, and Amber had 3 forms, the initial stereotypical chibi girl, the streamer hoodie (which became her main form), and her Petal form. 

For me, every game is a fashion game, one of the things I proposed when it came to the chibi girl, was that I wanted to reference a song and album from Hayley Williams that I really love. Petals for Armor. One of the things you learn with anxiety, and somehow you learn this with witchcraft, is to veil yourself with something that calms you down. For Hayley, it's flower petals, and she sings about that. For me it's light, for my mom it's light grey fabric, and it's different for everyone. The Petal Armor was meant to be this shield from all of the obstacles so that if you needed to take a break from trying to regulate her head size, you could protect Amber for a few seconds.

 I wanted there to be a big color shift for Amber in the game when she collected enough flower petals. I went with a blue and pink combination to offset the original orange and green. Two days in I had colored her and was on my way with animating her walk-cycle. I had a placeholder one that the guys could use for testing and blocking. On day 3 I had to pivot to making the obstacles, and then on day 4, I finished the final animation for Amber's main look. Day 5 I was focused on promo art and UI. I also did concept art for what I thought the game should actually look like in terms of the lighting and world.

Luckily I had my best friend Phoenix helping me out with the lineart for the promo version of Amber, if it wasn't for that, I don't know if I could have finished everything. I needed to make sure all of the art was done by the end of day 6 so that I could focus on doing the write-up for the game because I'm the only person from our group who spoke English natively. I also edited our gameplay video, designed a collab logo for us, and redesigned the promo art so that it would be a fitting thumbnail for the game's page.

Day 6 was so hard because I was spriiinting to get Petal Amber finished and animated. My team had finished the main stuff for the game because they thought we had one less day than we actually did. This gave us time to add the emoji reactions, which were originally a stretch goal for the game. Once again, my friend Phoenix came to the rescue and designed the emojis for us. What a lifesaver! All I did was give her the emotions, and a general idea of the design inspo, and she ran with it! I loooove my friend you have no idea how grateful I am for them.

On Day 7 I finally got a chance to stop drawing, and really focus on what the game looked like in the engine. I'd tried it a couple of times before, but I was so brain-dead that I wasn't really paying attention to the GUI. And we really needed to change it up.

In my opinion, the less UI you can get away with, the better. The UI we had before I petitioned my group for changes, was very cluttered and over-informative for the player. It was distracting and made you feel like you should look away from the character when it was completely unnecessary.  So I sent my team my version of what the GUI should look like, and after the changes were made, our game was done!