BC Game Jam 2018 – 3 Million Years 2: Return of the Library Book
A second jam in 2018 already!? Hell yes! February brought us our first go at the BC Game Jam hosted at BCIT Burnaby and it was so fabulously organized I needed to start this off by giving them MASSIVE props: thank you Jam homies for the good time.
Besides that we got to make a pretty cool game! Built to be a bit of a action puzzle platformer in the the guise of Shadow of the Colossus we ended up a bit less on the “Player Vs. One Boss” and more on the “Player Vs. Wave” mechanically. The puzzle element really took a back step too, and that wasn’t too bad a thing to happen: we really wouldn’t have had the time in 48 hours. In the end the player has to get through four waves against little flying enemies that will spawn continuously until the player turns off all the switches that were activated for that wave: wave 1 = one switch, wave 2 = two switches, etc. The only real “puzzle” bit to it that we managed to include was that there was four switches in the map and they would randomly choose which of the four would be activated for each round.
Outbreak hammered the gameplay down fast and hard, spending the majority of his time trying to turn the moving parts into a game which was a fair amount tougher than we anticipated. I spent the first half of the jam modeling, boning, texturing, and animating the “Librarian”(the big robot in the background): as well as modeling the world quickly for reference. For a second jam I also got my wife @BreaHappy in on doing all the 2D art and design, which really REALLY gave us a direction to play with. She produced some seriously fun art in the 48 hours we spent making the game. Funnily enough we started the idea with a more serious character and world design in mind and after a good few hours of trying to work it there was an eventual “FUCK THIS WE’RE GOING FUNKY” kind of breakdown and BOOM, all the art started to flow again.
Jam and Jam again we got help by the Tree of Audio bro’s to make our game come to life and decided later in the dev cycle when we needed an “invisible wall” graphic to stop the player going a certain direction, to cram their logo in. <3 to the Tree team, next year lets get some beers!
If you want to try this game out, download it here: 3 Million Years 2: Return of the Library Book
And if you want to check out a timelapse from my view, check that here: Angelbaits Timelapse
Thanks for checking it out and <3 to all you dev’s!
-Angelbait
