UoP Gamejam 2019
Once again June has been and gone (and this post is massively late going up!) and I've taken part in my ninth University of Portsmouth...
We went into this years gamejam with the basics of a plan, we knew we wanted to make a virtual pet. Both Jahangir and I have very fond memories of the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2 and we knew we wanted to make some sort of homage to it. Lets start with a trailer of what we managed to make:
With the introduction done we sat down and discussed our game idea, we decided to build a selection of mini-games which would expand the virtual pet and provide the actual gameplay. We decided Android was the best platform for us to develop for because we wanted the player to form a bond with their pet and be able to play with them wherever they are. We also knew we wanted the pets to have a minimum set of functions by the end of the week which were: navigating the garden, eating food and transforming into new shapes. With the basic premise decided we all began our tasks: LeeAnn began designing and modelling the pets (which we designated ‘Chums’), Jahangir began implementing the core pet systems and I started working on the first mini-game, a lane based boating game.
The first day was relatively uneventful, everyone got on with their tasks and by the end of the day the basic pet system was in place and Jahangir had also built a simple fishing mini-game. The boating game was fully functional if not pretty or interesting and a garden had been blocked out for the Chums to walk around in and LeeAnn had made the starting form for the Chum.
Tuesday was where the game started coming together, the Chums were in the game and LeeAnn had given them animations and began work on a huge number of body parts for transforming. Jahangir was building the system to allow the chums to eat, improve their stats and transform along with saving the data. I built a cel shader to give our art a more unified style. However this ended up taking a huge amount of time as I made the mistake of creating it as a post process effect, which unfortunately required the use of nodes which are not supported by mobile devices. I managed to salvage it and create a material which faked cel shading which worked but needed improving if time was available. Other content added included the main menu, inventory and mini-game selection and the Strength Chum body parts. I prototyped a mini-game inspired by Super Monkey Ball using the phones gyrometer to roll a Chum around small maps to collect coins but this idea had to be scrapped after a few hours of work as the sensors were too sensitive and I had spent too long on it with too little to show.
Wednesday was our last big push for mini-games and functionality, while LeeAnn continued to create and rig the Chum models for each Stat variety, Jahangir and I worked on 2 new mini-games. Jahangir focused on a basketball inspired game while I built a small adventure mode which was based around the idea of taking your Chum out for a walk and gathering food and coins while doing so. I built a small store which would randomly select items from the data table and populate an interface to allow the user to buy food for their chums alongside a ‘slot machine’ which would have the chance at giving the player any item from the data table with the possibility of a drastically reduced price. With all of the Chum assets in engine (52 unique body parts) LeeAnn began building artwork for all of the fruit and foods which would be in the game.
Thursday was our full day of polish and enhancements for the game. We spent the day detailing each mini-game, building the levels and environments for each of them. LeeAnn built the props used throughout the game in this final full day while I worked on implementing them into the game. I rebuilt the garden with new assets and detailed it while Jahangir polished each mini-game and built an end of game screen which would grant the player coins and food based on their performance. The data table for all of the food was finished and we ended with over 25 different assets for foods, each with a 3d model, icon, name and description and each granting unique stat boost and occasionally new colours for the Chums. We also integrated the 2 song soundtrack created by Tom Garner during this day and added sound effects to the chums, giving them more personality depending on their moods.
The 2 hours on Friday morning were spent polishing and building the game. We added a few assets to the environments and built the lighting for each mini-games. We also added a small tutorial system which LeeAnn created, title cards for each mini-game and app icons before creating a series of final builds, testing constantly before the playing session.
After all of the judging and playtesting of the other games the award ceremony took place. There were so many amazing games created during the week and everyone worked so hard. We were lucky enough to leave with the award for ‘Most Ambitious’ as the judges felt the amount of content and number of mini-games in addition to the entire virtual pet system was worthy of the award.
Chum Garden is possibly the best GameJam game I have ever had the privilege of working on and all of our team worked so hard to get it working. I was impressed with what we managed to achieve during the 4 and a bit days, we not only hit our goals for the week but we even managed to build in some of the features we only came up with as additions if we finished everything else. It was a wonderful week and I’d happily do it again.
If you would like to download Chum Garden for Android please visit the link below:
