This month I participated in my first Game Jam with other members of the WVU Game Developers club. We called ourselves the Jovian Giants and made a game called Giant Skies. The theme of the jam was “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants”. I think our game relates to the theme in the fact that it takes place on Jupiter, a gas giant, and your exploring the ruins of a Jovian civilization, which is the standing on the shoulders part. The game is a 2D sidescroller that is very heavily story based. I personally did some of the menu and level design for it. I’m glad we had people on our team that could do all of the art and music since I don’t have much experience with either (I usually find free assets to use in my games).
The game was made in the Unreal game engine. This was the first time I really used that engine, and it was a little frustrating because the game wouldn’t run on my computer at first. I had to update my graphics card, so it runs now but I have had several occasion where my computer freezes and I have to do hard restarts to bring it back. I’m still looking for a solution to that issue.
I think our team was very successful being that it was our first jam and I have heard from others that we were lucky to have a finished product. It was good that the jam was a week long, which allowed for each of us to work on the game on our own schedules. I doubt we won any awards but they announce those next week on the Unreal livestream. All the submissions are featured in a montage they play on their livestream, which I think is really cool of them to do. Below I have linked the page for the game on the club website and our original submission post we made on the unreal forum.
Game Links:
Game Page on WVU Game Developers Club Site
Link to Post on Unreal Epic Megajam Submissions Thread (#75)