Jame Gam Christmas Edition

Last week I participated in the Jame Gam Christmas Edition with one friend. The theme was Christmas, and the special object (an object you must include in your game and must have some significant role) was a gift. Together we created Murder Cars, a game about stealing presents and throwing snowballs at other cars.

For this jam, I worked solely as a 3D artist and level designer. I created every asset visible in the game, except the font. This was my first time working only on art for a game, and while I certainly enjoyed it and am very proud of what I made, I did miss programming the game and I felt a little disconnected form the game itself.

I think the jam went quite well as the game looks great (probably the best looking game I've worked on yet) and is almost entirely functional from a gameplay standpoint. I think this was because of our tiny team and 2+ year-long history of working together making communication and coordination very easy. I was also able to put a lot of effort into each asset due to the simple mechanics that required very few assets.

However, the game was not without problems most important of which were the gameplay not being very fun, the camera being jank, and the enemies being dumb. The game not being fun was due to the core mechanics not being interesting as they involved too little player choice, and this was exacerbated by the other two issues. While the camera jankness was not directly my responsibility, had I not spent an entire last day working on the ice texture (which really shouldn't have taken that long), I could have spent time improving the camera and perhaps coming up with a way to make the gameplay more interesting. Last, the AI dumbness was just due to the fact that my teammate was inexperienced with AI and that the jam was too short to make it smart, and I don't think this issue could have been avoided.

Overall, I'm very proud of the art I made for this game, and I had a lot of fun working on the game.