Jam game gets a prize, website to be updated

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Hello everyone! It has been two weeks! Ain't that crazy? I know my activity has been somewhat sparse but I try to keep things updated in here. Still between school, work and this crazy Jam, I had a lot to do. And so I have a lot to talk about in that regards.

A jam? What is that all about?

The jam was organized by game for change and the french embassy in the US in association with Unity. It mixed together student from Senegal, France, the USA and Canada.
Long story short it was amazing and people were very supportive. I might post my face because I did a couple of interviews and talks so I might post my face here and there.
Anyway we had one week while being in school or working or internship, whatever. But we had to work on a small game around the theme "Amplifying Voices". We chose to talk about livestock that gets massively killed everyday. Since pigs are really compassionate and smart. We chose to control a pig. Since I love the Nine Inch Nails song, we named the game Piggy!
You can play it here!

How was the game made?

We didn't have a lot of time but I decided to invest my days I was working on City of Love into Piggy. I didn't extensively worked and once tired, went to sleep, took break. And all that beautiful stuff.
We thought at first about some game ideas, but we liked the idea of being a truck driver that didn't know was delivering live stock to be killed. From that idea we turned it around on its head a bit, and we wanted to make a horror game where you are the livestock to make the main interaction with the game being around empathy.
​I also love horror games, like a lot.
I was the programmer and I took a bit of the role of technical lead, offering advice and help to my team mates, as well as doing demos, teaching unity, and doing a bit of coordination with time zone. And it worked really well. I'm really happy about that.
Our artist and other programmer had very busy schedule. The other programmer had a bit of Unity experience prior to this jam but not a lot. And our level designer was not used to the tasks needed for the jam.
Still they all managed pretty well.

Here's a breakdown of how it all went

Logistic part

With time zone and constraint and school work, we needed tools to be able to relay work without being necessarily present. Here's what we did set up for that.

Source control through github

As you can see, it was heavily used by the end, also I crunched a bit there to finalize the project. Very sorry about that. It was an ok crunch and it was only one night. Still you will see the scope was a bit too big.

Setup a Kanban

This way we can put some work to be done there and someone can just take it and work with it. I also took the time to put some gifs and steps on how it works, especially for the butcher, the only enemy in the game.

Every time some work needed to be potentially done by someone other than me, since I made all the architecture, I would give samples examples and assets to help other devs do the tasks that were asked for the game.

Communication

Even though we have all that going for us, brainstorming, talking and having an actual conversation about stuff might be needed. In that regard we asked the organizer over discord to set things up for us to share progress to the team so they have an idea on how the game is going on as well as meeting once per day if we can to talk about what's going on and what's a priority.

Everyone did that, not just me or Mouhamadou!

And with all that set up we can focus heavily on developing while being sure that important dev informations could be conveyed throughout those tools.

Early development

Camera was set up first

Then the lighting

Control setup through the editor

(I used a lot of reference through the editor for my designers, and it ended up being a problem, I'll bring that up later)

Merged all that work together

Meanwhile, on game for change side's

Game for change asked a couple of things from the participant.

We were encouraged to:

• Share the project's progress with every other team in a 5 minute talk while sharing screen over zoom
• Share our progress and help each others

It was pretty cool and something happened with me. I invested myself pretty hard in this project and did things that surprised even myself. But I'll keep that for the end.

Getting ready and additional features

So far, project seems to be going pretty smoothly. Every technology that needed to be imported was imported. And I need to start creating more game specific features.

Cutscenes and buttons

Subtitles on top of that

Placeholder animation system

Hiding mechanic

As always, progression is going smooth, but as you might see, assets are yet to be implemented. With everyone schedule it was hard to have them early on and so I did my best to make prefabs as well as placeholder stuff to be able to implement that quickly. That way, with minor tweaks, the whole game would be ready to ship.

Late additions and issues

Did you know that using events everywhere makes some assets and function unavailable ?
I use a lot of Unity Events so everything can be set in game like call a music or a sound to be played. Well unity events CAN'T interact with audio sources or Playable assets.
Made me stay way too late on night to fix the build.
After fixing that I did...

An interactive title screen

Play the very beginning of the game to see the final result

Animation

Butcher Insanity

Took a lot of time to work

Death VFX

...and everything nice!

Anyway after a lot of work, our level designer went and replaced all the prefabs and made the game that we had in the end. As you can see, a lot of worked was put into details and some late additions made the workload a bit strong at the end. But not so much.
We were very ready and we had a lot of information to just adapt and make the game like it was.

As usual a bit more time for polishing the level design and the game as a whole once everything was imported would have improved a lot the game. But still, all the audio work that you can't see there and all of the ambiance worked really made the game.

​I'm so proud!

Something weird but good happened

On a more personal level, during the Jam, as I said earlier, we were asked to participate in zoom calls, meetings, feedback sessions and such.
If you don't know me... Even if you know me you might think I'm a pretty social person. It may be true, in an environment I can adapt, small talk, make jokes and just like being your everyday co worker, or student pal or anything.
But this is not my comfort zone, I learned the skill but it wasn't innate if I may say.

Well...

Out of my nature, I participated a lot during the session through writing or vocal. The reason why was that people were pretty shy at the beginning, and as an aspiring game dev that gets oneself into situations to understand things in a more thorough manner, I know how much feedback and participation is important. Especially from other game devs.
And so since it was pretty quiet I stressed out and I did talk. I gave feedback as honestly and openly as I could and did everything I wish I had when it came to encouragement and feedback as a game dev.
At first I felt pretty alone but once I shared that I felt I talked too much a lot of people gave me a lot of praise. And it was very heartfelt and wholesome and...

I don't know, I'm just so thankful about all these people.
They rock.

But yea it was very wholesome and eye opening and I feel more confident into helping others and doing it in a way that would benefit them. And I'm happy I could learn that. I think it was one if not the most important thing I take out of this jam.

Wanna check the code out?
​
You can download the whole project here: Click me!
You'll need Unity 2020.3

So what's next for me!

City of Love is still on hold!

I know it sucks I want to keep doing it...

BUT!

I have friends in need of help that are doing some small scaled projects for their studies. I'm helping in the art and sound department. It will improve my art, and will allow me to have some more credits on some more project which is good for personal growth but also I get to help an old friend on a project and make it better than what it would have been if he worked on it on his own.

So far not much work was done but here are some rejected arts!

That's it for this week, I'll keep you in touch with the other project progress and hope I can get back into my passion project soon!

Until next time!