Koala Kaos - Global Game Jam 2019
Koala Kaos is a 2D platformer adventure, in which a koala avoids various Australian bush hazards to escape the deforestation of its habitat.
This game was created in 48 hours with a team of 4, during the 2019 Global Game Jam. On this project, I was game/level designer and producer. On the team we had 2 programmers and an artist, along with 2 “freelance” animators. Below is a little wrap up about my experience and my role in the project.
After facilitating our ideation process, I began quickly forming a list of different features we wanted to include, and then we worked out the minimum viable product we wanted to have at the end of the jam. With this, I delegated out which tasks each person would tackle.
From here, we jumped right in and I started by drawing out the stages of the game on the whiteboard. I like being able to erase and switch sections around, and throw different enemies and obstructions in. On the right here you can see the levels sketched out in red and the intended path for the players in blue. I created it in about 6 different phases or stages where I planned to introduce new obstacles/enemies.
Level design is my favourite part of game development so I really enjoyed putting my headphones in and focusing for an hour or so on this task. Once I was happy with the level, I ran it past the other artist to discuss how we would proceed with building it. Around this time, we were approached by 2 more team members who began helping us out with animation.
Day 2
The next morning, I started by selecting about 9 different Eucalyptus trees from google images that matched the shapes I needed for the level. From here I traced them in Photoshop and laid them out in the path of the level. I then passed each tree shape on to the artist to give them appropriate colour.
At this point there was some discussion about how we would handle the koala eating the leaves on the tree, and one of our programmers prototyped a nice physics-based tree branch that used a hinge joint to respond to the weight of the koala. While this looked great, after a couple of hours it quickly became apparent that putting hinge joints on all 9 trees was outside our scope and I made the call to scope down and revert to the static trees. Despite this, we did keep the leaf-eating mechanic but put it aside while we worked on other, more important aspects of the game that were more necessary to the MVP.
While our artist was working on art aspects of the level, I started setting up the game in Unity with different scripts and animations that other team members sent through to me. Note: I did ask the team at the outset if they’d prefer to use a git manager, but they said we’d probably be fine without one and being someone who doesn’t usually focus on scripting or building the level itself, I didn’t challenge this. I did like the simplicity of this and I think it helped prevent time-costly merge issues, but it did also cost us in terms of time wasted where one team member needed to work directly on the level meaning I had to wait until they were done before continuing. Next time I’ll push harder for this and hopefully save us lost efficiency.
As the art assets started flowing in from the artist, I then started to assemble the level as per my design. It didn’t translate perfectly but I worked with it the best I could. This was inter-cut with adding other aspects like the magpie and bulldozer, and we spent a good deal of time getting the koala working properly. We also spent quite a bit of time figuring out the Unity animator to try and get our animations working. Luckily we got some help from a few different people and had it sorted out.
With different assets like rocks, grass, and other native plants coming through, it was another opportunity to put my headphones in and focus while I built the level in Unity. With this task, I worked late into the night assembling the level and finally called a halt at about 1:30am!
Day 3 & WRAP UP
On the final day, we consolidated what had already been done, ticking off the priority list, and were able to give some attention to the bonus items we were interested in including. With most of the art complete, our artist created a really nice menu screen and rigged it together with the help of one of the programmers. This was a really quick and easy way to give our game a more polished look.
I spent some time on the last leg implementing some 3D sounds in the level, which was reasonably quick to work out and gave us another little leg up in terms of polish.
With a bit of time to spare and almost all of our priorities ticked off, we decided to have a go at implementing our rather tragic car mechanic. One of the programmers quickly created the script for it, and our artist created a road floor asset and a car that came in different colours. I scaled them appropriately and adjusted some of the timings, and very soon we had a car that worked on a timer that could “hit” the koala. It was a bit confronting, but it brought home well our game’s message of the impact of human activity on the koala habitat.
Overall, I had a great time creating this little game and the process allowed me to further identify and hone in on which skills I want to build within the game production process.