roman hyacinths

Note: This blog post is a WIP! And technically not really a post-mortem...

Update: Benedict Beaver the Builder ranked #6 in art and #51 overall out of 7,634 submissions and 158,000 ratings to GMTK 2024!

I wanted to write a run-down of my experience developing a game with a tiny team for GMTK Game Jam 2024. If you didn’t know, the GMTK Game Jam is a huge jam run by a popular game-analysis  YouTuber, Mark / “GameMaker’s Toolkit”. This year was the biggest GMTK jam yet, with over 7,700 entries. It also was the longest GMTK jam yet, with a four-day development period between the theme announcement and deadline (a significant extension from the two-day development period of every prior year).

I’m really proud of the game my team made this year (which I suggest you play first, to avoid spoilers and to provide context, if you haven’t already) — so let’s dive in!

Team Setup

I’ve always worked as an artist/animator for game jams, but aside from narrative jams, I almost always work with at least a programmer partner. In my ideal situation, a team goes beyond just having a greater end product: the comradery, increased support and encouragement, being able to bounce ideas off of each other and make stupid memes along the way — it's all a huge part of what makes jamming so fun for me.

I worked with a truly fantastic team this year — not only folks who were unbelievably talented, but also kind and good at communicating. The vibes this year were great.

I had e-met Patrick / “Patbug”, a programmer, after GMTK 2023. We both had landed in the top 100, decided it would be great to collaborate sometime, and then stayed in contact off-and-on over the next year. When GMTK 2024 was announced, I knew it would be a great time to finally collaborate.

We decided to rope in a sound person, and I was adamant that keeping our team small by having someone who could do both composing and SFX would be best. When Tyler / “pleadthefilfth” reached out to us, I was awed by how stellar he was at both, and we added him to the team.

We did a preliminary game jam, Pizza Jam 2024, in early July. While it was smaller and less competitive than GMTK, we did well in the final result! I’m also quite proud of the art and polish on this one.

Day One: Friday

Despite liking the theme almost immediately after it dropped at 1 p.m., my team struggled to come up with an idea that had a concrete gameplay loop.

We had two main ideas:

• Ant or other bug running through a crowd of people
• “Beaver the Builder” where a beaver is trying to rebuild his communities’ housing after a flood, needing to make houses to accommodate the sizes of drastically different animals, with two minigames: one where you’re picking up logs from the river, and another when you’re using the logs to build houses

I had to run to a class that evening I had signed up for months prior, so I didn’t get started drawing art at all on Friday. We settled on the latter idea when I got back.

The main concept I was going off mentally of was this mockup by our lovely programmer:

That night, I started creating a draft Pinterest board for inspiration, which I do every game jam.

Day Two: Saturday

For most of Saturday, we were still fleshing out ideas. I got started on art around midday by making an asset list, which changed throughout the jam as we honed in on our idea and narrowed our scope:

I then hopped on a call with some friends in the Scrabdackle server, and got started on art:

I drafted up our protagonist after Googling some beaver pictures...

... but almost immediately decided to push it in a more stylized direction:

I then moved on to log design. I designed each square log segment as a Photoshop smart object with a strict artboard size, making sure that the edges overlapping with the other logs were seamless.

I finished up the day by making the first draft of the community board, which I hated and completely scrapped later on. I honestly felt so discouraged by how bad this art was that I just went to bed.

Bonus content:

Day Three: Sunday

I woke up anxious about how much left we had to get done. I was debating whether to go to church on Sunday, and ended up literally bringing my laptop and drawing pad, sitting in the back, and drawing throughout the entire sermon. #Grateful 🤪

This was the sketch I came back from, post-church:

When I got back, I quickly revised it:

My "GMTK 2024" playlist had played about a bazillion times at this point, so I decided to move on to dubiously greener pastures.

I then got a brilliant idea:

I streamed much of the house design process to the Scrabdackle server (shoutout ANTP for help with this truly disturbing snake house that only got worse).

After eating way too much Thai takeout, I refined the asset list further and went to sleep.

Bonus content:

Day Four: Monday

I woke up even MORE anxious on Monday. We didn’t have a functioning prototype yet, and I was getting a little restless about how many unique houses I had left to design. I drew and exported a few houses Monday morning, and then knew I had to revisit the community board.

Those sketches quickly turned into this:

Right after finishing, I had a brilliant idea for the cover art. Patrick had suggested floating logs as an easy animation — what if I including Benny the Beaver floating alongside the logs? I took a look at how I wrote perfectly seamless bobbing animation expressions in the past, and then quickly threw together the GIF, which I’m really proud of. Shoutout to BenjaTK for mocking up the two covers under consideration for comparison, completely unasked for!

I started cutting corners Monday night:

We had a bit of a panic that night about difficulty level once Patrick sent us a full prototype, which initially didn’t have any gnaw limit and a pretty loose timer. We floated a few solutions, but ultimately the easiest solution was to limit gnaws, so I made this icon, which Mr. Meme Man Tyler immediately turned into a server emoji:

I was up until 1 a.m. Sunday night, working on what would end up being the introductory animation.

That night I sent an insane message to ACarr telling them I’d be awake at 6 a.m. “at the latest.” I thankfully slept in until 7 a.m. the next morning.

Tuesday-Onwards

I barely got anything done on Tuesday aside from finishing a few assets and giving build feedback, as I had to to work. The end screen was a struggle, as I was pretty creatively wrung dry at this point:

But... thanks to the amazing COLLABORATIVE POWER of my team, we managed to get the game submitted two hours before the deadline!

Rating games this week has been simultaneously exciting and stressful, LOL. I’ve been grateful to be really proud of what we made together!

Takeaways

Ratings just closed earlier today, and we’re still waiting on the scores and rankings being released. That said, I feel like my takeaways are pretty separate from that.

I feel like I’ve massively improved at being able to consistently make good game art over the past year. I never was an visual artist as a kid, only a writer, and it wasn’t until partway through the pandemic that I picked up a drawing pad my high school boyfriend had given me and started fiddling around with drawing. Game jams have been a great way for me to combine my loves and create something I’m really proud of.

I have a few areas I’ve come to realizations in:

• I hate eating so much takeout, so I should meal prep in advance of intense game jams 😂
• Thinking about how a game will be received (as well as more obviously having people on a team relying on me) are good motivational factors when I'm feeling the creative slump coming on

Things I want to work on for the future:

• Drawing dynamic characters more easily, whether animals or human
• Environmental and character animation; I've been specifically thinking about trying out Spine2D and/or other animation software like SpriteMancer, as Adobe After Effects is really not ideal for any animation aside from cover art

That's it, for now, I guess? If you've made it this far, thanks so much for reading!

Signing off with love,

Julia