Wholey Bowley - Global Game Jam 2020
Wholey Bowley is a third-person bowl simulator (we made that up) where you play as a broken ramen bowl aiming to make themselves whole through the Japanese art of Kintsugi.
This game was created in 48 hours with a team of 4, during the 2020 Global Game Jam. On this project, I was game/level designer and programmer. On the team we had one other programmer and 2 artists. Below is a little wrap up about my experience and my role in the project.
DAY 1
For this jam I was really clear that I wanted to work on level design in Unity, in a 3D game. I also wanted to try my hand at doing some programming, which was new to me this time! I wanted to branch out from my previous experiences, which I think I achieved this time round.
This jam’s theme was “repair”. After looking for some inspiration online, we decided we really liked the idea of incorporating Kinstugi - the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, creating a beautiful new piece of artwork from something that was once broken and unusable.
We did some brainstorming and came up with the wacky idea of making the bowl the playable character - you start as one piece of the bowl, and by traversing around the kitchen, you collect gold pieces which enable you to put yourself back together when you run over another bowl piece.
I started by mapping out the ramen kitchen environment on the whiteboard, thinking about the kinds of traversal we could work with while incorporating balanced progression in the types of risks/rewards I was giving the player. I placed each gold piece in varying locations, with some pieces within easy reach and others in harder to spot locations.
I tried to create clear affordances to the player and make it obvious which places could be climbed - drawn in green (drawers, pot stacks, open cupboards) and which spaces were ok to “fall” on without being broken again (marked green boxes - sacks of flour).
Of course, bowls can’t really climb - we were inspired by I Am Bread to create a funny traversal system where you control the various points on the bowl to “grab” on and let go and move. There had to be some suspended disbelief about what our bowl piece could actually climb, but I did my best to make it kind of realistic.
Our 3D artist and I collaborated to standardise the size of the environment (the numbers you can see around the diagram) and he started creating the various setpieces for me to use in our Unity scene.
DAY 2
Next I started building the blockout in Unity - this was really my first 3D blockout! I like using colours so I can easily see what’s what in the scene, identifying climbable spots (orange) and safe fall zones (green). As the assets began flowing in from the artist, I replaced these blocks with the setpieces.
I really enjoyed doing this work - it was easy to get stuck in. For the most part, everything translated really well due to the good communication amongst our team.
DAY 3
On the final day I helped rig up our menu and implement some basic controls, which were improved upon by our other programmer. The level was handed off to our 3d artist who finished off the set dressing and added some nice lighting to the scene.
Overall, our game turned out to be fun and the jam was a great experience!
