Thursday, January 31, 2013

Game Jam 2013



This past weekend I attended my first Global Game Jam up in Cleveland. There were a lot of really incredible and talented people up there who I really enjoyed meeting. I also loved seeing some awesome little games emerge from the amongst chaos. 

My one regret is that I wish I had introduced myself to “more” people because I only really talked to a small handful of individuals. If I attend next year’s event, my goal will be to work freelance style and help out a number of different teams instead of working solidly with one individual group. This way I can interact with more people and get more involved. 

In terms of my own game, I was rather disappointed with the outcome. I worked with two individuals who didn’t seem to really have their “eye on the prize” throughout the weekend. An overactive scope mixed with a lot of distractions lead to the game not being playable at all. The final product was nothing more than an animated intro cutscene (a shitty one, at that) followed by some broken gameplay that had no end. I give my teammate the benefit of the doubt however because he totaled his car on the way up to the Jam and was in the hospital for 2 weeks prior to the event. I’m absolutely certain these events factored into the group’s overall energy as we worked.

Personally, I felt like I accomplished a decent amount of work.  I modeled, unwrapped, rigged, and animated 2 entire characters as well as couple of other props. The models aren’t by any means “top notch”, but considering our time restrictions, I’m happy with what I ended up with.
I’m looking forward to getting back to work on my own projects where I will actually have a decent amount of time to make the art look good :)