Bento box for lunch during game jam 😀

Today was game jam day! We started by opening up Unreal and downloaded the repo our team made beforehand. The game our team decided to make was a 2.5D puzzle game in which two players must work together to solve puzzles. The characters and environment is 3D while the backgrounds are 2D. The narrative follows 2 space explorers from different galaxies that find themselves stranded on the same deserted planet. They must work together using the various strengths that they acquired from their different cultural backgrounds in order to find their way home.

For the jam I was the designated team manager and sound engineer/composer. Seeing as how I don’t know how to make sound effects nor music, creative commons was my best friend. I also made the Trello for our team to keep track of tasks necessary for completion. The main 11 hrs of the day for me were spent finding sound assets, editing then in Audacity, asking the team members if they liked them, then repeating. The japanese students on our team seemed to really like the background music I found for the game, and I was pretty happy with the sound effects I found for each character. My goal was to differentiate the players in sound, so the technical based character had more futuristic sounding effects compared to the spiritual character. It wasn’t my job to impliment the sounds into Unreal, but I did it anyway try and learn the program a little bit, but I undid my changes before pushing the repo.

During the jam we had to communicate via both google translate and DEEPL, which was a bit challenging but not as much of an issue as I had initially thought. One of our group members spoke pretty good english, which made a huge difference, but one of them was also remote since he hurt his leg. The challenge of working together to complete this game in such a short amount of time was the real highlight of the experience. It was a bit jank and unorganized, but thats part of the fun I think. We had bento boxes for lunch/dinner which were super yummy! After working diligently for 11 straight hours and reaching a point where we thought we could wrap up in the morning, it was time to head home for the night. We bussed the KCG students over to a train station and then headed back to our hotel, where all of us hung out in one of our hotel rooms and played Jackbox games on the switch, which was really fun. After hanging with everybody for a few hours I played some Zelda and went to bed. Overall a really fun and unique experience! Excited to finish up the game tomorrow and present it to our special guests :).