UE4 Mega Jam
For the First week on the masters we were waiting for things to start so instead of sitting around doing nothing myself, Zhané and James (which are also doing the masters) decided to do the week long UE4 mega jam with Dom who was in our 3rd year.
The theme was announced as "Settle the score" our first ideas we things like a bar fighting game and also a game where you play as Harambe the gorilla and you get revenge by shooting zoo keepers; we quickly came up with another idea which was to split the bill at the end of a meal.
We first started to draft out what the game might be like, we wanted a series of characters that swapped out expressions when they either paid too much or too little unfortunately this wasn't achieved due to lack of time. In the end we had a game that you needed to look at the bill and find out what people had eaten/drank and take money from their pile to pay for it; you do this by dragging and dropping notes or coins into the middle of the table. There is also plates of food and glasses of drink to figure out what people had.
Here is the banner for our game:
Split the bill game banner [1]
James and Dom worked on the technical side and blueprinted the game, Zhané worked on making likenesses of us and I made the environment assets and also rigged the characters for Zhané; unfortunately James ran out of time to get them posed in engine.
Here's a quick gif of a broken version of the game:
I used CG textures and edited them in Photoshop. I also made logos to go on the receipts in each level how ever they ended up not being put on in the final package, but here is my favourite, from the coffee shop:
Overall we got a score of 6.4 which I think is a great achievement we aren't going to win but that's not what we did it for; by doing this game jam myself and James really realised that we want to be indie developers and make games as often as possible. Needless to say we will be continuing to do the game jams from the guys at Epic.
Here's the live stream of the judging https://www.twitch.tv/awesomeallar/v/95579223?t=09h53m17s it's already set up to start at the time our is being played.
Bibliography:
[1] THE TRASH PANDAS (2016) Split the bill game banner. [Online image] Available from: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?124973-Epic-MegaJam-Submission-Thread&p=608922&viewfull=1#post608922 [Accessed 07/11/16].