Between 5pm of January 31st and 11am of February 2nd, I participated in the Warren Tech Creative Jam.

Not the global game jam, but intentionally coinciding with it. I still made a game with my friends at WT. <There would be a link here, but it doesn't exist. yet.>

Our team consisted of 4 artists, myself included, 3 designers, and 2 programmers.

We had a fraction of the graphics design room to share as a workspace, the room with an inconsistent swath of computers, but also plenty of them, with Wacom Bamboo tablets, and the limited real estate of single screens. Unfortunately, the room was also pretty far "inland" in the landmass that was the building, so there were no windows and it was always hot during the day. How the graphic design class functions in there every day is a mystery. We were "prepared" to manage our game with a git repository, since that would work with the school computers as well as laptops we brought from home. It looked like we were well constructed for success till 5pm.

The theme was "Wolves," announced at 5pm.

I specifically wanted to make a twin stick shooter, even without the shooting part. (We're in a school, we literally can't have any resemblance of guns.) We did make a twin stick shooter. You play as the wolf of Pompeii, who historically died chained to it's house, and kill sulphorpus and ashen reanimated corpses as you try and escape the burning city. The chain to your collar is the melee weapon you control, or that's what it would've been if we got it in properly in time. Ri[.

So: Day 1, the end of January 31st.

CHEWY HIT THE HYPERDRIVE

Day 1 was a trip. Not in any drug related sense, just that we broke a bone as we tried to hit the ground running. The bone was the git repository. It was going so good... for a whole 90 minutes... We decided to do pixel art because one of our designers offered to help with art too, saying he can do pixel art. His art wasn't bad, but his animations were out of step, unsurprisingly. I started with making a 3D wolf model that I would later composite and pretender into sprites, but after the night was over I never touched it, and it was never finished. We did get a wolf sprite though. I went to bed first, and as I closed my eyes, I witnessed the shambling git repository.

Day 2, the optimal day to get things done.

I wake up at Breakfast time, and we just humor each other for 30 minutes as we eat. At the end, I ask the programmer who's up, "how's the repository." To my surprise, he and the rest of the team hate it, despite having worked with an svn before. Something went wrong down the line that we weren't prepared to fix, and we didn't want to spend any more of the remaining 28 hours we had working on it We used one or two flash drives for the remainder of the jam. I spent an extra few minutes to sit around with our late team member while he ate breakfast, because I didn't want him to be lonely, and then found myself working on managing the art assets. I was the only one who knew how to even vaguely set up sprite sheets, animations, animators, and such in Unity, so I spent a lot of the time putting all those together, manually. Not doing art, but managing what was there, and coming in. I was fine with this though, everyone was hard at work. After noon though, someone took out their Nintendo Switch. And this is where jade was begot in my veins.

My team went into Party Mode, dancing to Venga Bus and Caramelldansen, wasting time and only entirely returning to earth and work 20 hours later to clean up. Of course there was always at least one of us working, but I wish they'd try and push themselves to work a bit for this special occasion, and because we're on a clock.

Late in the day, some time between and after dinner, I opened up Photoshop to give our wolf a proper walk animation. Because of the perspective and the resolution of the sprite, as well as my inexperience working from a top-down perspective, I think the animation isn't worth bragging about. But I do think I made it look enough like a walk, or a canter as it's called, to the average eye.

Also around this time, I began emphasizing to start building the game, so we could address the biggest issues at the start of the next morning. But, I didn't quite realize when I had communicated my point to them, and so I briefly repeated and continued, till they expressed their annoyance. I sat down and continued to work on the wolf walking animation, also hit build to see what would happen, saw nothing remarkable because I didn't understand Unity scenes in builds and was the first to sleep again.

day3, welcom to die .

I wake up about 6 hours before the deadline. The room is completely silent, the lights are dim, and the only computers that are on shouldn't be. On the floor, everyone is sleeping, scattered across the floor like the gibs of several exploded tables in Gmod, and posed like the like's ragdolls. I sat down and took the time to continue making the wolf canter animation, specifically making the tail move convincingly. I started by animating a little skeletal guide of parallel lines, swaying back and forth and with the most distal segments lagging three frames behind. Then I painted over half those frames with one color to make a silhouette of the tail, and just flipped the silhouette for the other half. Then I locked the transparency and painted a second tone over every frame. This starkly contrasts with how I animated the legs, which was mostly abuse of selecting and moving. Ultimately, the tail looks the best.