Overview
2 Day Game Jam
Team of 4 People
Released October 27, 2024
Made in Unreal Engine 5
My roles:
Game Designer
Programmer
3D Artist
Play as a skele-bear under the sea as you ravage a school of spooky fish! Don’t get caught by the mysterious diver who stalks you at every turn.
Bear Bones was our submission to Gamecraft’s October 2024 game jam. The theme was “Bare Bones.” I wore a lot of hats in this project: designer, sole programmer, and one of many 3D artists. A personal highlight for me was creating the Diver character from start to finish.
Accomplishments
Fully programmed the game:
Character movement
Enemy AI
Victim AI
Difficulty ramping
Created every aspect of the Diver character
3D Modeling
UVs
Textures
Animation
Exporting to Unreal
Designed the game under an extremely short turn-around, with an emphasis on creating a steep difficulty curve and a replayable core loop.
Design Philosophy
We had an extremely limited amount of time to create Bear Bones so scope was the most important consideration during our ideation phase. In our brainstorming session, we decided to pursue the action-arcade genre. This allowed us to focus on creating a shorter experience and fewer assets.
Difficulty Ramping
As this game was extremely short, it was a challenge to figure out how to capture the player's interest and encourage them to replay. An obvious addition was to add a high score mechanic, but if the core game isn't compelling players won't care about the score. A way I found to quickly make the game more compelling was to spike up the difficulty.
While testing ways to increase the difficulty, I dramatically increased the enemy's move speed. The enemy was now unfairly difficult to fend against, but it created a thrilling gameplay loop. After further iterations and testing, I settled on a balanced yet intense speed for the enemy. Additionally, I made the game spawn more enemies as it progresses.
In the end, I had the enemies start slowly and gradually progress to their difficult speed. I set it up so the game would reach its most difficult point after about 1 minute of playtime. This way players would rapidly be introduced to how difficult the game was, but not so quickly that they'd be discouraged. This was an effective way to promote replayability because players didn't have to wait long for the gameplay to get exciting.
Creating The Diver
Creating this game allowed me to dive into some other aspects of game development. I got the opportunity to create every aspect of the game's Diver enemy character. Because of the intense time limits of the jam, I decided to go with a simplified yet stylized design. I went with a polygonal, Playstation 1 style for my character.
Evolution of The Diver:
UV and Texture
Animation
I created a simple swimming animation for The Diver. This was the first time I had animated something in Maya, so it was a bit of a challenge for me. This was the perfect opportunity to learn, the retro style I was going for allowed the animation to be rough.