Today has been all Game Jam, all the time. We woke up at around 6:15am, got breakfast at around 7:30, and then headed on over to KCG at around 8:30. We touched down on campus at around 9:30, and then we were off to the races. 

We immediately went to work on our games, and my team (Team 2) was hitting the ground running. Shoma, one of the KCG students, had put together a spreadsheet detailing out our game and providing more descriptions for our planned features, and so since we had had this since early this week, we already knew what we wanted to do and the rough idea of how we were going to get there. So we went straight to work, and from then on (for me at least) it was about 10 hours of straight modeling and rigging. I had to utilize a base from a previous character I had made to create our new character, Character A, and once that was done I then moved on to rigging both Character A and the character I had created before, Character B.

Rigging took a long time, btu overall it was good experience, and I learned more about just how fast I can position joints and perform emergency weight painting. It took about 8 hours, but I finally completed Character A and rigging Character B, so now I was ready to start animating. During this time, Shoma and Reo, the other student from KCG, were hard at work programming and designing the levels for the game, and Shoma was also working with Brody on finalizing sound. Megan was working on UI Art, and was able to finish it fairly quickly even despite the fact that she was unfamiliar with Unreal Engine and its interface. Slowly but surely, it appeared that our game was taking shape. 

Communicating with the KCG students was interesting, as although we both spoke a little bit of each other’s languages, there was still a language barrier we had to naviagate around. I tried my best to speak in Japanese, but there were always one or two or a few phrases that I didn’t know how to construct, and so to get around it without losing too much time, I defaulted back to English. And although Shoma knew some English, there were still a good deal of words that didn’t quite click, and so the two of us had to take a few tries to simplify what we were trying to say or let DeepL translate for us. It was an interesting experience though, and one that I think helped me understand more the nuances of cross cultural communication. 

Once it hit 7:30pm, it was time to wrap and our main Game Jam day had come to a close. I of course continued to do some animating on the bus ride back, but once I got to the hotel I sort of just crashed from the tiredness. On to the last day of Game Jam!