Today was the start of the game jam! It was also a national holiday so every business, food store, and campus door was locked. We only realized this after somehow being let into the campus because ewe ended up spending 25 minutes being locked inside the school. There were literally no open doors. No exits. Talk about a fire hazard.
After arriving tactically late we split up into teams to start plotting ideas. I have never participated in a game jam or even had a game design class but with my experience in just playing games I felt somewhat prepared. The magi theme in question was Better Together which implied either multiplayer or a really cool Last of Us type game play but with only 3 days available I jumped on the former. My first idea was about a Ninja that was controlled by two people and could platform through levels. I drew a quick doodle of a ninja and it took off. By the third round of siphoning ideas my ninja idea was in the top 10 out of 25 potential ideas. They were all written on the board when I realized 2 very important things for this game jam. 1. There were very few artists in this room and 2. I just made a game that wouldn’t use 3D. I quickly started talking to Germans to see if any of them needed a 3D artist and luckily Bernie, one of the Germans who we first met, was making a 3D arena game called Beat the Boss. I quickly abandoned my ninja game and joined his team.
By then end of the voting process 6 games remained. Counter strike wannabe, Bloob-game, Point and click adventure, Amanda’s cute otter game, Beat the Boss, and surprisingly my ninja idea. So I got to work on a cool game while the game product of my mind also got to be made. I really liked my team. It was full of talented designers and coders and although I was the only 3D artist, I lucked out in finding a texture artist in the group so I wouldn’t have to do everything. We started mapping out the idea for the boss and how it would work to fight him. I was super excited to be working in my field on my first game.