Game Jam #2 |Process|: 1st Collaboration on Threads
You'll be able to dash on this background by the weekend 🌞 - Thread Post
Second game jam which means yes, i’m still very new to all of this. Which is why starting a second one only a couple months after my 1st, was such a dangerously exciting thought to my little trigger-happy-opportunist-for-making-things-with-peoples brain. My first game jam was done with friends and we had been on the lookout for a new project to really put our heads together on and bring about our teamwork. I’d always wanted to put some pixel work out there and I had my chance to add some of that there. It was a fun experience that really knit our group together and made us excellent friends and even better devies. Shortly after that we decided to start a long-term project, one that would allow each of us time in between to focus on building our skills to better our game making craft. From the start of that till now I’ve been able to work on other projects while still giving our main game assets and concepts. Having game dev stuffs always on the mind, I started to cater my socials to show me exactly that; which is when my lovely thriend Kenn shared a post from John whose team was in need of an artist for the November GameOff 2023 game jam. After being added to the Discord group almost immediately, spending a couple of days COMPLETELY overthinking my capabilities of doing this without my friends, I committed shortly after.
Now, I was given the privilege of having complete artistic freedom here. Which honestly made me a little nervous at first, because that also meant that whatever I thought of was going to ride on me to get done and actually be delivered to our programmer properly and with enough time. Pressure aside, that feeling also reminded me that this was a good opportunity to stretch my skills in the world of Pixel Art - I’d always wanted to make a pixel based game, hell just do pixel art period. I got a taste of it in the first jam, this is my shot to full send it for the first time! I decided to move forward, 16bit style. Which means…
It’s Game Plan Time
Yeah, so I had no idea how to go about this or how to communicate with this new group. I only knew their screen name really, what if I say or suggest something that ticks them off? (Do I have issues? Maybe I have issues) I shook it off and decided that maybe putting a visual together of what I’m seeing in my head might help. So I jumped on pinterest and found what spoke out to me best to help me share my thinking.
I rounded up the images and dropped them into Illustrator, which has been my go to software for a couple of years now due to my day to day work so its just what I felt most comfortable in. It’s also where I learned to do my first set of pixel assets for my first game jam, so I felt confident just working in that space to begin with. With a couple of shapes and the images I found for reference, I organized my general idea in a slope to represent both the literal “climb” theme of this mountain the character would be exploring as well as the color gradient shift that would represent the positive mood shift of getting out of the gloomy ground.
It had been a minute since I last made some pixels in illustrator, so I revisited Vector Art Academy’s youtube video tutorial on how to get started with the process again and went from there. Here are some screenshots of what some of the assets looked like before and after expanding them from their base grid:
I had each of these on a 16x16 px artboard so I could export them as PNGs more easily - this was only for the MC though. The background assets where all assembled on one artboard to be exported as a traditional sprite sheet.
Swapping over to Aseprite
The overly dramatized learning curve: by me.
I’m sure you’re wondering, “ Cyan, why didn t you just start with a pixel art software to begin with?”, I’ll tell you why: because I caught the worry bug. I was worried that by picking up a new software just as I was starting this game jam I was going to fall behind and not be able to do my part and carry my weight. However our programmer was noticing some inconsistencies with the initial PNGs I sent over from illustrator that was affecting some
of his animations, so I went back in and fixed them the best I could and it worked. But, i knew after those fixes were done, I was probably going to come across others in the future and with more complicated designs that will surely slow down my workflow and output, and that just wasn’t going to work. So it was decided, Aseprite is happening either now or never!
After spending some time in the program I realized it wasn’t as crazy difficult as I had set it out to be in my mind. I still needed to watch a beginner tutorial to get me started, but that was 9 min. of my time well invested for what I was able to put out the weeks after.
Now this I thought was nifty: Aseprite can be linked to your Steam library and be launched as a “game” which means, it’ll log your hours working in it! I thought this would be a fun little feature to use to track my time progress and show it off at the end. What I unfortunately forgot about this feature was that, if the “game” is opened, its registered as clocked in time whether you’re active in it or not. So while i was doing other work in between pixel animations, it was also being logged in as “active play” time and had completely skewed my real hours put in. I’ll have to be more conscious of this if I really want to document my work time more effectively for future jams!
While jumping face first into creating the enemies, I found a curious inspiration from laying down the pixels. Specifically with the Mushroom Shooter enemy from level 2. Although I shared him on social media as what seems to be a concept-first then pixel-animation enemy, he was actually born the complete opposite. I didn’t know what he was going to look like until i had started laying out the pixels. The ambiguity of the square blobs poked at the illustrator in me and I asked myself what might he look like if he were a concept “first”? I loved this new approach and the turn out I had with him so I shared it and made it an official workflow tactic. Bonus points: it’ll help me get a head start on 2D assets for any future solo dev work!
Part of my personal project will include turning the illustrations/concepts into pixel art. This is where my brain is atm with the game jam I'm participating in. I'm constantly being reminded of how much I love this medium. It's about time I give it more attention:)Here's a tester pixel animation I did of one of our enemies that I decided to illustrate this morning as an excersise. Do excuse my pixel drawing/animating technique, I am still but a noob. - Thread Post
I know the pixel art isnt perfect, but as I do more of this work I’m sure i’ll pick up on the techniques to really make it pop and translate the life of the character more smoothly. In the meantime, I’m just gonna enjoy being a newbie with unlimited Aseprite access.
Basic enemies were fun and allowed for simple experimentation and easy movement practice. The bosses required a little more attention to detail as well as more frames to really show what my intent on their movements was for. This is where I spent the most amount of time trying to figure out 1. How are they going to move 2. What kind of attack wil they do 3. How many attacks should they have and finally 4. How do I translate what I’m seeing in my head to this program with enough time for us to put it into the game smoothly? I managed to get what I needed for each, but closer to the end than what I had wished for.
I copied and pasted all of the animations together to make one big loop of all of his actions, including his death sequence for an animation summary of his movements. I’m sure there’s an easier way to do this but this is all I new at the time xD So much copy and pasting…
Game Illustrations
This part, maybe not as surprisingly, was the fastest and smoothest part of the jam for me. Sort of. I faced other challenges for these while making them within the last 24 hrs of the game jam that weren’t related to software issues. These varied everywhere between attending other originally scheduled events, weather, health, to a stranger leashing their yipping dog to my stool where I was working (I should have said something, I just smiled and waved instead :,).
On top of that, I, being loyal to the itty bitty canvas sizes of Aseprite, took that thinking into Infinite Painter while I was working out and about on my tablet and created this painting on a canvas much smaller to the resolution I had hoped to produce with the final image. By the time I had realized this it was too late, and was honestly just happy I had enough time to pump out a menu screen for us before the nights end. I started the cover when I got home - which was a much simpler concept I already had in my head that I planned on combining with some of the background pixel art to begin with- and finished it up the next morning before the due date. I was so relieved!
Takeaways
• Starting is 90 percent of the process. - My mental game is my greatest weapon but also my greatest hindrance. I realized with everything I did in the last month, with this project and others, heck - even with this post! - It all feels possible as soon as I get my feet moving. The other 10 percent is just stylish flailing. I’ll get better at the stylish with time.
• I really love pixel art. - I thought it would get old for me after a project like this, but instead I feel excited to explore, learn, and just do more with it! It just might take over most of my media posts, or become my go to medium for when i’m procrastinating on other projects ;p
• Sometimes you don’t end up with what you envisioned, and that’s okay. Thats part of the fun! - After playing the game I noticed many things that I could have done better on my end and things I also didn’t account for when putting my assets/characters in place, and some parts didn’t even make it in entirely! The bright side to this is that this gives me an opportunity to re-work and re-present my assets as what i had envisioned them originally and/or turn them into something better :)
• Creating is where it’s at. - Finishing a project is crucial to growth, and builds confidence in yourself and in your group, but there’s nothing like that feeling of wanting to start it all over again so you can fall back into the rhythm of things. The more you do it, the better you get, the hungrier you are at the end of the next one, and I’m READY FOR IT.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post. I hope you were able to take away from it something of value and enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed typing it. As I build my community and connections on Threads and get to know more developers and artists to really add to the mix of things, I’ll be able to put more blogs out like this one in the future.
If you’d like to keep hanging out, come say hi! You can download and check out the game here, or if you’re more of a memento type person who would also like to support me, get yourself a sticker riiight here:)
Stay zeemie,
