Our final day of Game Jam was upon us! We got up bright and early again and rushed on over to KCG, in order to have as much time as possible to finish our games. 

Coming into the final day, I still had about 8 animations to do and only 4 hours to do them, not to mention I still needed to push my changes to our GitHub. Luckily, Megan helped me learn the basics of GitHub and I was able to push my changes, but that’s when I realized the importance of having the same version as my peers; I was using UE 5.1, as I thought I would only be testing locally and then just sending my files off to someone else to import. However, I didn’t know how useful the ability to push your own changes was before committing to 5.1, and so when I pushed my 5.1 assets, they couldn’t be read on the 5.0.3 machines, and so they became phantom files and created saving issues. Megan was able to revert the changes though, and I then was able to import and save/push the assets correctly using her laptop, but man, I really wished I had just done the work earlier of trying to download and switch my Unreal version, then I could’ve used my own machine and not had to pilot hers and make it more complicated. 

By this time it was now almost 10:30am, and I still had 8 animations to do, so I was starting to freak out a bit. But I steeled myself, and just got straight to work. I powered through the rest of the animations and knocked them all out in about 2 more hours. Miraculously, I finished all the animations we needed for the game. They were a little scuffed and not super polished, but I thought they were good enough to get by and support the game. At this time, though, we were 30 mins out from presenting our games, and we still hadn’t built yet. I was a little nervous that none of my assets would get implemented despite me sending them in, but at this point I just wanted the game to function and so didn’t push the issue; if they were in, great, but if not, I still had the files for later and could try putting them in myself. 

There were two guest judges that came by to view our games when it was time to present, one from an independent game studio in Japan, and another from Epic Games’ Community Outreach, which was really cool! They came around and gave us feedback on our games, but when it came time to present our game, disaster started to rear its ugly head. Our game wouldn’t connect with controllers, so we couldn’t play it to demonstrate. Shoma and Reo went right to work trying to figure out why, but the presentations had to move on, so we ended up waiting to go until the very end. By that time, Shoma and Reo had gotten the controllers to work, and so Shoma and Megan were able to play Co-Op and show off our game! It actually came out pretty nice, despite not having any of my models or animations in it yet. The core gameplay seemed to be there in some sort of base form, which was really cool to see. So overall, not too shabby for a 14 hour game jam in my opinion!

Once the jam was over and we all said our goodbyes, we were free to do what we wished for the rest of our last day in Kyoto. So a group of us took the subway with Toshi-sensee and the judge from Epic Games back to Kyoto Station, which was pretty cool! I got to talk with the judge for a while, in both English and a little bit of Japanese, which was awesome. Once we got back to our hotel, we offloaded our technology and then headed back out to catch a Shinkansen to Osaka! 

We visited the Nintendo store, Pokémon Center, Capcom outlet, and One Piece store, all in the same floor in a building right above Umeda Station. Osaka is a very interesting city, and after visiting it twice, I noticed just how similar to NYC it was. The buildings are all tall, the shops are more reminiscent of ones found in NYC and sometimes a bit more luxury, but I feel as though the area was not the same level of clean as other parts of Japan I had been to so far, I did find a few more things on the ground. I think it may just be the part of Osaka I visited however, and overall it was still a great place to shop and look around!

Once we finished shopping, I grabbed some takoyaki from a nearby small shop in the basement floor of the building, which was delicious! It was probably one of my favorite foodie moments here so far. The takoyaki was hot, and the broth inside was so super and flavorful, and then followed by the octopus, it combined to create a really unique and fun sweet but tangy flavor! 

Finally, we all returned to the hotel and packed up our things. We had a lot of fun playing some Jackbox games together too, before heading off to bed late in prep for our trip back to Tokyo the next morning. And so, our Kyoto chapter comes to end, just as our next chapter begins!