LiU Fall Game Jam 2023
I participated in the 2023 LiU Fall Game Jam, where I produced all the artwork for the game Operation: Shell Shock alongside four other developers.
The LiU Fall Game Jam is hosted once every year by the game jam division of LiTHe Kod, Linköping University's student run programming club. This was my first year participating, and my second in-person game jam. It was a lot of fun and we ended up with a game that was genuinely enjoyable to play and fun to compete in. Play the game here
Characters and Animation
Animating characters for a video game is always a challenge, especially during a game jam, where the end result is not really known until late in the project. This project was my first real venture into the world of character animation, and it was a really fun challenge. To speed up the process, we decided to produce prototype sketches early on, which were then animated quickly and added to the game so that we could get a feel for which animations would be necessary and which would not.
The sketch below sadly did not ever make it into the game, but the running animation was sketched in a similar manner and then inked and colored in a simple manner not too dissimilar from older Adobe Flash style games.
Level design and art
When levels change as much as they do in a game jam context, it can be difficult to adapt the artwork. We decided to on an approach where the level would first be blocked out by our level designer, then I would simply paint over the blocks with a single large image. This resulted in a relatively fast workflow, but came with flaws like the images taking a lot of texture space and therefore not being visible in a webgl context and the levels collision mesh not matching perfectly to the artwork.
Colors and communication
A key part of making a good game is communicating to the player what you expect them to do in any scenario. This was magnified by the pace our game ended up playing at. As a result, I put special effort into coding the art in such a way that the player can easily tell what is dangerous and what is not. Solid surfaces are indicated by harsh black inked lines contrasting the gray-blue backgrounds, environments have muted colors to make interactions pop, and anything dangerous is marked with a neon red. It makes for a game that is easy to understand out of the box.
