Hi guys! This year I particpated in the low res game jam as an artist. Now I'll be very honest this was a last minute thing as I Didn't even know the game jam existed till I saw a post by @JensVide (our amazing musician on the team) down in the Collabinate.
Now I'm gonna skip a few days ahead at this point Jens had introduced me to the rest of the team as an artist and now we were brainstorming for ideas for our game. The optional themes were
Catch em' all
Invasion
Oppsite Day
Cooperation
Glitch in the Matrix
Wildfire
Recursive
Creation Story
But does it Float
Hidden in Plain sight
After some thinking our team went with the theme of Wildfire,the idea of the game was to stop the fire from burning all of the trees in the area, once the trees are burned then it's game over. Now that the idea session was over things really started to kick into high gear. Our Game designer @SirMilkman made a game design document detailing the ideas and mechanics that our game would had. And, I had to make some concept art for the game. While yes the game would be in 64 X 64 resolution the purpose of the concept art was to help with what kind of vibe and environment would the game had.
So my first concept art was of the main character for the game, what better way to understand the vibe of something then to take a look at the MC. I had a few ideas for how the Main character would look I had an idea that the MC was a Park ranger and it was his first day of the job, he was a bumbling detective investigating some acts of arson. However what I settled on was an stupid, muscular golfer who wore shades. In conclusion a loveable dumbass with some cheesy humor who loves puns.
I'll be the first to admit that I really rushed myself on the concept art and yes It's not my best work, however our deadline was the 15th and I didn't want to do things last minute (even tho I did but we'll get to that later).
Now the vibe I was going with for these pieces was some psychedelic mix in with some goofiness. I actually had an small idea the fire would look something like this, this was so our game would pop out more, but atlas it didn't happened which was understanble given that we had a strict deadline.
Now that the MC was done it was time to do my favorite thing in the world (not) Draw backgrounds and environments.
Since I established MC was a golfer I had to draw stuff realted to golf courses. I first started off with what type of trees would be around in the golf course, I went with palm trees mainly because due to me living near the border of Mexico I see a lot of palm trees in the golf courses around here. Next after sketching the tree I drew a piece with these palm trees on an golf course. I still wanted to keep the psychedelic vibes so I drew everything pretty melty, and I'll be really honest I'm pretty damm proud of the background I drew. Lastly Just because I drew something stupid for the golf flags, it never got implemented into the game again which is understandable and it was a pretty small detail.
Afterwards Once the team saw all of the concept art I did, Jens started to make some absolute banging music based off the art I've done, (seriously go check him out), however my work was not done. Now it was time for me to actually make some sprites. I'll be honest and say that the low resolution was an challenge for me, since the majority of the pixel art I have done have been on a much larger resolution. So this dumbass lesbian basically YOLO the sprites.
First things first I did a sprite of the MC, the golf club and of the palm trees.
Now here was the tricky part I never really used discord that much when it came to pixel art so I had to resize some stuff which was a pain but hey it all worked out in the end (thank god).
Lastly I had to send in some sprites for the wall and lawnmower, and here's where I fucked up. During the last few days of the jam I got busy with some personal stuff so I had to take care of a few things. At the time Our Progammer Selecur had made a prototype with all of the assests that we had.
On the 14th (yes our last day) I asked them what sprites we still needed and it was the Lawnmower and Wall. So I went straight to work on those sprites. The lawnmower was pretty easy after I had gotten used to the size restriction.
And for the wall I made a simple tile
And with that I finished everything I needed to do for the game jam. Honestly I had some real fun working on this small project and it gave me some great experience, this was my first time being apart of a game jam and I would love to do some more in the future. Also I like to think this is gonna help my portfolio in the future and it'll show that I have some important skills when it comes to Game dev.
Anyways check out the game itself it's pretty short but I'm still proud of what the team did.
And as always Please check out the wonderful people that were apart of the team.
JensVide (muscian)
SirMilkman (Game Designer)
Selecur (Programmer)
Bloom (SFX)
Also here's me as part of the credits
