🎮Game Devlog: BYOG Game Jam 2024 – Putting Grandpa Back Together!🎮
Recently, our team dove into the whirlwind experience that was BYOG Game Jam 2024! If you haven’t heard of game jams, they’re basically intense competitions where you make a game within a short timeframe based on a specific theme. BYOG is India’s biggest game jam, held annually as part of the IGDC event. This year’s theme? Evolving Abilities 🌱. And the clock was ticking ⏱️ with a 72-hour deadline!
Day 1: Brainstorming and Character Creation 💡🎨
As soon as the jam began, we jumped straight into brainstorming mode 🧠. Our team consisted of four people: Shreyash, Shreshth, Arthuro, and me. After about an hour and a half of debating ideas, we each pitched our concepts and held a team vote. Shreshth’s idea won 🏆, and just like that, we had our game plan.
I was in charge of creating the main character. Armed with Blender (my trusty tool of choice 🛠️), I set out to turn our character from a 2D sketch into a full 3D model. But...it’d been a while since I’d used Blender – a bit of an “oops” moment 🤦. After a quick refresher, I got into the groove and finally had the character ready by midnight 🕛. I sent it over to the team, watched them start piecing the game together, and called it a night around 1 AM.
Day 2: Animation Marathon 🎬💥
The next day started with a bright-and-early wake-up call from Shreyash ☎️. My task? Character animations – and there were a lot of them! Since our character’s abilities evolved over time, I needed to create variations: no arms or legs, one arm, two hands, one leg, and, finally, the whole body 💪.
To make things easier, I asked one of my teammates to “surgically” separate the arms and legs in the model 🧑⚕️. First up was a "one-arm crawl" animation, where the character crawls across the floor. Let’s just say there was a bit of "method acting" involved – I had to crawl on the floor about ten times to get it right 😅. Next, I created the "two-hands push-up" animation, followed by a wheelchair movement animation where our character pushed the chair with just one arm.
Next was a tricky wall-crawling animation – moving up, left, right, and idle. By nightfall 🌃, I sent all of it to the team. Shreyash integrated them into the game, and with my tasks for the day done, I decided to kick back and watch the team in action. Day 2 was a wrap! 🎬
Day 3: Main Menu and Death Animation 🕹️💀
The day kicked off with another call from Shreyash about some animation tweaks 📞, so I hopped into Unity to help troubleshoot. With things back on track, I started working on the main menu scene 🎨. I added a dramatic “fall and crush” animation – probably my favorite yet! The character hits the ground, limbs scattering everywhere 💥.
For extra flair, I added a blood particle effect at the moment of impact 🔴💉. I also designed the main menu logo and buttons, then sent everything over to the team. I also created a sleek new pause menu background and reworked our logo to make it more readable and professional.
Day 4: Final Touches and Playtesting 🛠️🎮
The last day was all about polish. I created an in-game “spammer” slider – every time the player spams a key, the slider increases and then resets when they release it. I set it up in Unity, packaged it, and sent it over to the team 📤.
With my tasks wrapping up, I decided to give the pause menu background some extra love 💖. I tried out several designs before settling on one that felt just right. I also polished up our main logo one last time for extra readability 👀. With only two hours left, we jumped into playtesting mode.
During testing, we spotted a few bugs, like the canvas size glitching out. But our awesome coders tackled them fast ⏳. With just 38 minutes left, we uploaded everything to itch.io and officially submitted the game! 🎉
For a final touch, I designed a catchy banner and background image for our game’s itch.io page.
Wrapping Up 🥳
Participating in BYOG 2024 was an incredible experience. I even skipped my college exams to fully commit to the jam (shh, don’t tell my professors 🤫)! If you get a chance, please check out our game, rate it, and let us know what you think! 🎮
Enjoy the gameplay – it’s been a wild ride, and we’re thrilled to share it with you! 🎉
Game Link - PUTTING GRANDPA BACK TOGETHER
My Other Games - GamedevPurvesh
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