Tag: Game Jam

May 27th: Game Jamming!!!!

Today was the big day, the game jam! For me it started off pretty rough, I woke up a bit late and had to rush downstairs. I also found out my laptop decided not to download the engine I needed because my graphics drivers weren’t good! It was so so so fun to uninstall and reinstall all my graphics drivers and unreal itself for a couple hours ( this is sarcasm). Once I got past the pain that I downloading, I got to work. I was put on UI art which isn’t my thing but I tried my best anyway. I like design for UI but more on the technical side.

We spent the day snacking, sitting, coding, and helping each other. The LCG students were familiar with Unreal when a lot of RIT students were not. At RIT we typically use Unity which is entirely different. The day was pretty quiet overall with just a lot of head down let’s get this done energy.

we got some rice balls (onigiri) for lunch and a really nice bento box for dinner ( I forgot to take a photo). The bento box had some white rice, bamboo shoots, a meatball steak, tempura, some fried chicken, a lot of greens, and a sweet waffle for dessert. It was quite yummy. Our jamming lasted from 9:30am to 8pm so basically all day. The Japanese students on my team were very quiet other than when they needed something done or had updates for us so it was pretty quiet. I enjoyed just sitting and listening to music for a day since we have walked like 15 to 18 thousand steps everyday. Literally it’s crazy here’s a screenshot of my steps. The most being from kimono day surprisingly.


That’s a lot of steps. That’s basically it for the day. I took a nice shower and played this game I downloaded called Colorful stage ( it’s a rhythm game). Tomorrow we have to get up at around the same time (7am) and have 3 hours to finish up our games. Well then, see ya later blog!!

Gaming and Jamming

Today was the main day of our game jam! It was super fun to finally get to work with our teammates face to face and make some key decisions about our project.

There’s not too much for me to talk about today – we basically just sat in a room for 12 hours and worked on computers (something my body is very gracious of, as I desperately needed a break) to produce something of sufficient quality to present to everyone tomorrow. While I won’t give any spoilers on what Team 3’s game is, I can say that my main job was working on the art assets and I made nearly 30 assets in total! Combined with Esther’s assets, Liam’s localization and SFX, and Naoki, Ryuki, and Tamura’s planning and coding, if everything comes together I think we’ll have a pretty sweet product for having less than 24 hours to work on it!!

Tomorrow we’ll finish out the game jam and then have some free time for our last day in Kyoto. I REALLY want to go to Nara to visit the deer park, so I’m hoping that we can manage to get into the otter cafe early and maybe head there or Osaka for dinner depending on the park’s schedule. Fingers crossed!! To end I’ll share some of the assets I made for our game 😉

7th Impact

Toei Studio Park Kyoto

Today was our free day in Kyoto, followed by the game jam kickoff at 5pm. For the free day Vincent, Maddy, Esther, Sten, and I went to the Toei Studio Park in Kyoto to see the giant Eva 01 statue. We went with the understanding that we would only be able to look at the statue and take pictures in front of it. However, we were able to do the full boarding and linking experience. We got a bunch of pictures of ourselves in front of the Eva and then went inside it, where we took a quiz to see which of the characters in the show we were, based on some random quiz questions. After that there were cardboard cutouts of the characters in the show that we got to take pictures in front of. Then we ascended the mech and got to do a compatability test by sitting in the plug in its neck. It simulated what it feels like being shot from the underground city to the surface, like they do in the show. We all got really low compatability percents :).

Sten in front of his favorite character, Asuka

After going through the Eva we got a printed photo of all of us standing in its hand, then explored the rest of the park. There wasn’t all that much there unless you wanted to do some of the attractions, but they costed extra and seemed to be meant more for kids. We shopped at the stores in the park and I got a little Gojo keychain and a coin purse. There was a cool Evangelion shop that had a bunch of cool stuff, and there was a lot of samurai and ninja merchandise which I thought was super strange. The park was overall kind of underwhelming, since there wasn’t really anything for the shows that Toei has, it was all just ninja themed areas. We ate at this resturant that served Evangelion themed dishes which was alright, not the best food I’ve ever had but not the worst. After eating we did one last run through of the building and then headed back to our hotel.

Before we got the hotel Vincent, Esther, and I went shopping at Uniqlo in Aeon Mall, and I bought 4 Attack on Titan shirts for only 30 USD :D. After shopping we walked back to the hotel just in time for the bus to KCG. After we got to KCG we did a tour of their new building for masters students, which was really cool. Made RIT look cheap with their fancy event floor and rooftop garden. Their classrooms and library were also super nice, and they had a sound mixing room that looked really cool. After the tour we headed over to the building next door to kickoff the game jam! It was super cool to meet all the japanese students, and they were all really nice. We ate pizza and snacks while getting to know each other. Then we all installed Unreal in preperation for the next day, said goodbye, and then took off. Today was super fun and I am excited about what the game jam has to offer.

New Friends in Old Places

Today was about as busy as I expected it to be, but boy I did not think it would physically affect my body as much as it did.

Today was finally our free day!! Which meant that me, Megan, and Chloe were up early in the morning to head to Kiyomizu-dera and rent kimonos for the morning! The store was certainly not prepared for a very tall American woman to walk in, so the kimono itself was a little tight and the shoes were a bit too small, but it was still fun to walk around and take lots of photos!! My feet were dying after three hours of waddling through thick crowds and cute stores trying to find some good spots to take pictures. But we did get a lot of really good shots!

After we finally peeled our kimonos off, we made the walk to the Kyoto Pokemon Center to see if it would be as busy as it was on Wednesday. To our surprise, there was no line or crowd at all! I was able to buy a couple small things, like another Made in Japan charm with Eevee on it and an adorable sleeping Eevee plush (Can you tell I like Eevee?). I really wanted a coin purse, but they were out of the medium size which was the only one that I wanted so my search for the perfect coin purse continues (and at this rate will likely continue until a day or two before we leave, with my luck).

Our other plan for today before we head back to the hotel to meet with KCG was to visit the Loutre Otter Cafe, which was one of the big wishlist items that we wanted to do, but unfortunately they were too busy. Hopefully we can go back on Friday and play with the otters!

Hanging out with KCG at getting to meet our teammates for the first time was super fun! They ordered lots of pizza and other sides (though there was only 1 pizza without a bunch of toppings that I don’t like that was swiftly devoured) and brought a lot of snacks and candy for us to try. There was also a small group of boys that were repeatedly eating wasabi, for reasons that will always elude me. Everyone from my team was super nice and I am looking forward to working with them for the game jam!

To end the night, a majority of our group hung out in Brody and Vincent’s room and played Jackbox party games and Mariokart 8 Deluxe while “drinking” (aka we bought some random stuff from the stores, sipped a little, and then forgot that we were drinking because we were very into the game). It was really nice to get to hang out with everyone because we’d been trying to do it for a while but had always come back to the hotel too exhausted to do anything. I’m a bit nervous for the game jam tomorrow, but I’m definitely looking forward to getting to sit down for a majority of the day!