Global Game Jam 2013

This was a concept paint of the environment "Heart Chamber" where the boss would be encountered.  I was focusing on clear materials definitions for the environment artists, suggestion of propulation assets, and clarification of the red blood cell powerups and the virus mine enemies.  It was done wholly in photoshop, in about 3 hours.  Later, after I made the Cell logo text, I converted the paintup to a 'wallpaper' format as you see here. 

It happened January 25th- 27th, so I'm a little late in posting up the meaty bits associated with the efforts.  Reasons?  Doing a 48 hour event pushed a lot of things behind by about 48 hours!  After that there's been some family medical emergencies, and work that is under NDA....but I've been noodling away. 

If you every get a chance to do a GGJ, do it.  Anyone is welcome, anyone interested in game production at all.  There were even two boys, 13 and 14 I think their ages were, at the Pittsburgh location who set out to code an entirely text based team.

This concept was trying to feel out the opening menu screen and whether we wanted custom font or just to use a premade font.  We liked the effect, animated the blood cell throbbing with a heartbeat sound, and went with it.

I took on the role of Producer for an outstanding team, as well as a Concept Artist, Game Designer and Texture Artist.  Producer meant collecting files and holding meetings, being the final decider on directions discussed, keeping everyone to deadlines, and most of all keeping cool, calm and collected while encouraging team enthusiasm and health.  By the end, concept and UI work complete,  I was putting blankets over sleeping teammates and telling others when they'd been working for more than 2 hours straight to stand and have a 5 minute walk and water break.

Our Team logo, NoBrows.  It's a stylized portrait of Travis.  Apparently at some point he'd lost a bet and shaved his eyebrows as a result long prior in history.  So our team wagered him his eyebrows if we won any awards.  It became a running joke over the event, and the logo was a surprise to get him and everyone to laugh.  It worked well.  Sadly, he still has his eyebrows in real life.

Some early iterations of White Cell's design over top of a vein/artery environment concept.  With only 48 hours, I was trying to cut down by combining the environment, propulation and character on one piece.

My excellent, talented teammates were  - Amanda Wallenhorst, Jordan Jenkins, Cody Wilcoxon, Matthew Kline, Travis Kehler, Kyle Hickey, and Theresa Liddington.  This year's theme was a heartbeat, and we had decided early on that we wanted to make a side-scroller in the Unreal Development Kit.  Cue the canonball run collection adventure of White Cell, who fights to free your heart from the grip of Cardiovascular Disease. W, S, A, & D guide the character along the environment to collect red blood cell power ups, and players have to be careful to avoid the exploding viral mines.  The product came out beautifully polished for 48hours and 8 sleep deprived artists, and everyone who played it commented on that aspect. 

Our Stylized main protagonist, White Cell.  

The enemy virus mines and some indication of how they should animate to the skinning/rigging team.

We discussed wanting to maybe spend another week jam session on it as a group, figuring if we got that far in 2 days, a dedicated 7 might allow us to push in a projectile attack, some other interesting enemy variants, expand the 'boss battle' and have more than one level.  I really hope we can organize it together.  As the Producer, I suppose that will be in my court to start emailing everyone!

In the meantime, All GGJ participants upload their source files and playables to the GGJ site, and agree to released them under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 version of the Creative Commons License. So go play our game, Cell, as well as all the other amazing 48-hour free vignettes created by this amazing event!

The base palette we decided to use as well as a prop concept in a infected and non-infected state of texture swap.

Spoiler?  WhiteCell is based on a basophil immune cell, so win or loose, he has excreted his defensive chemicals to poison/eat the enemy and perishes.  Its a glorious sacrifice to save the body and become a hero.  If he loses....poor thing gets infected.

We even had suggestion that we should have WhiteCell plushies made, with the hole in their body still there, looking cute and gore. It was great people got into the ambiance and feel so much, and really liked the style.