Hello, I’m the Rosewood Requiem Developer, I participated in the Captain Coder’s game jam where you make a game but then share your experiences of what came out of all your work. I’ve seen a lot going on in the game development sphere. Still, personally, I’ve always had issues with the fact that some people really believe that you cannot make a game without spending unforeseen amounts of dollars on assets from the game engine assets store and other sources! I decided my game jam blog would primarily emphasize the educational aspect of showcasing the ability to create a game using predominantly free and self-owned assets all as a one-man team! It just takes time, dedication, time, and a lot of creativity. (and time ^.^) But most importantly you have to know what to use. We will start from the beginning and I will talk about my experiences and all that I used to make my submitted game jam game and also do a list of some lessons on what to watch out for in a game jam.
Part 1: The Beginning
The game jam began 10 days ago, with a theme of “you are the monster” The stipulations that the game needed were to be playable for at least 13-year-old without traumatizing them, the game must be made within the time constraint of the game jam itself (so no cheating!) and most importantly it needed to be in some form of pixelation art style. Be it voxel art pixel art or 3D art with pixel textures. Other than that it was free reign. So I decided to start my idea out by making a voxel-style game similar to the Pokemon, where you have one monster and you battle something akin to the Elite 4.
I spent 2 days making rigging the model and the skeleton but then I found the first mistake of the game jam:
- Try not to over scope
- Definitely do not try to throw all your eggs in a basket from the get-go you should really plan out your idea and see if it’s practical
- Make sure it’s something that you think you can do and not something you think would just be really awesome
The game jam only contains a finite amount of time so you should really try not to do this because you can end up either burning yourself out and/or not having a game to submit in time and then you’ll be left with nothing but sadness and unfinished project staring at you.
Now that I recovered from over-scoping I decided to rain it in and instead make a text adventure with a little visual on the side from the model that I made now that I had 8 days left to get all this done it’s time to reveal the process that I used.
Part 2: The Process
So, I decided that I would take the “monster” that I made and make a game with that so we will talk about the sources that I used to achieve this. First, we will check him out:
Fear Me. What a monster, I know right? So this man is a guy that I made within the software MagikaVoxel a free voxel-making software you can obtain on the internet to make 3D voxel assets) but for free. Now I know he looks like Minecraft Steve with a 401k but you can make a lot of amazing creations in Voxel editors there are subreddits and creators all around for you to see what I mean. Along with that, I used Blender the 3D modeling and animation software. With that and the power of youtube tutorials, I was able to learn how to make a skeleton rig for him and change his clothes to make him a bit sleeker.
I even went back into Magika to make a little cigarette and a floor for him. Then I took him, and I threw it all into my software of choice the Unreal Engine 5.
He looks a lot better now he looks pretty cool I’d say. The cigarette light was a simple process. The smoke line and the little falling lines that you see in the background took a bit of work (and youtube tutorials to follow)
but the cigarette light is just a few simple steps.
- Select a point light.
- Put the point light inside the part of the cigarette that is supposed to be lit.
- Turn the light into a bright orange.
And then boom you got a lit cigarette. However, I will say I have never done anything like this like I’m sure a lot of you aspiring game devs as well, and I will say this game would be nothing without YouTube tutorials. (Reddit is also really helpful but at this point in time a lot of the Reddits were not open during the game jam because of moderator strikes that have been occurring. HOWEVER, whenever the strike ends and the dev Reddits decided to reopen a giant hub of information will be reopened to you!
The next thing I wanted to talk about is the music that I made for my game. Because my game is basically a text adventure displayed over a man falling in a chasm I wanted there to have some really good music to stand out with. Obviously, if you are not musically inclined there is nothing wrong with using music from artists (with permission and the appropriate crediting of course!) but if you have an ear for music the next source that I used was BeepBox an online tool for sketching and sharing instrumental music. There’s a very large amount of instruments you can use and once you are done you can hit the export button and you have music that belongs to you. I believe my game has 6 things made in the Beepbox:
- The atmospheric Noise
- The first falling song
- A tense song
- a little noise that plays when you click the button prompts
- A sad song
- The upbeat ending song
That’s a whole soundtrack made by myself! You would be surprised how many people don’t know about the things made on the internet that you can use for your creations.
The last thing that I used was I needed a flowchart to make my text adventure map out all of my dialogue and all of my choices. and for that, I used an online tool called Miro.
Miro is an online workspace or as they like to call it “the digital whiteboarding” software. Basically, it’s a really good tool to use for mapping out and/or designing ideas either by yourself or with your teams I really enjoyed using it and it helped me map out my story for my text adventure as I will show below:
I’m sure this is very hard to see I just wanted to show you how large it can get! Here is a easier to see example of a small part of the text adventure mapped out:
For the most part, the rest of the game was made using Unreal Engine Blueprint, I followed a youtuber tutorial on how to make a text adventure in unreal and I followed his instruction which lead to the completion of my game!
That is most of what I had to show you because that was all the things that I really used to make my game come to life. I will put links to all the software that I have so you can know where to find them because I love gaming and game development and I look forward to seeing where it takes us next. Thank you!!
Link to sources:
Blender: https://www.blender.org/
MagikaVoxel: https://ephtracy.github.io/
Unreal Engine: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/
BeepBox: https://www.beepbox.co/
Miro: https://miro.com/