This was the first time entering Ludum Dare, or any game jam at all, for the both of us. It was a heck of a weekend. Unfortunately time (and Unity errors) got the best of us. Still, I'm happy with what we accomplished and plan to get the last few features implemented in the coming days.

:doughnut: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/donut-dash

Feel free to check it out, and hopefully it won't make you too hungry :D

Edit: Just a quick warning, it's a 98MB zip file and it might not run well on slower machines. Didn't have time to test/optimize!

Hey you! Yeah, the 2D/UI artist who is still looking for a team! Well look no further because you just stumbled upon a small group of seasoned jam veterans. 🎖️

Our small team has dozens of jams under our belt, but this year we're short a 2D/UI artist. Hopefully you can fill that gap and help us achieve greatness! (Or at least very-goodness :sweat_smile: ) Here's what we're looking for:

• 📱 A 2D artist with experience in UI design
• ⚙️ Familiarity with the Unity engine and working with its UI tools
• 👨‍💻 Some previous game jam experience (can be any jam, not jut LD)
• 👥 A basic understanding of / familiarity with source control (esp. Github)
• ✂️ A desire to help create a jam game that is a cut above
• 📅 An interest in the potential for continued post-jam development
• 💬 Excited to work with others and converse with the team (we use Discord)
• 🎴 Bonus points if you have any UI experience with (or a love for) card/tile-based games or board games
• 📋 More bonus points if you have any additional gamedev skills to add (most of us wear multiple hats)

If most or all of these things sound like you, we'd love for you to join the team! Click here for the application link.

And if you have any questions just leave a comment :)

I'm not really sure where to begin with something like a postmortem, seeing as how I've never done one before. So I figure why not start off with some fun stats!

• 🌟 Total 3D assets created: 87
• 🏞️ Environment kit pieces: 14
• 🖼️ Gallery exhibit assets created: 67 (excluding base pieces)
• 🥤 Energy Drinks consumed: 6
• ☕ Caffeinated non-energy-drinks consumed: 7
• 😴 Total hours of sleep: 11 (approximate)
• 🤩 Overall satisfaction level: 💯

(If reading isn't your thing and you just want to see the pretty pictures, scroll down 😉)

Over the years of participating in game jams as a 3D artist I've learned quite a lot. I've learned new workflows and techniques, I've learned new software and pipelines, and I've learned that in order to bring out your best abilities and talent you need to work with a team that knows what you're capable of. LD58 was my fifth time working with the same core team I've worked with in previous jams, so that meant we didn't need to waste any time figuring out our team composition or trying to guess each others capabilities. It's always nice going into a jam knowing you can drop in a discord call when the theme drops and get straight to work on discussing concepts without anything else getting in the way.

This time around with the theme of Collector we ended up on the concept of being a museum curator who is in charge of curating a museum collection. Right off the bat I knew we were going to need to go as wide as possible when it came to art assets. After all, it would be a pretty boring game if there was no variety. With that in mind I was happy to let the designers come up with a huge list that we could later trim down a bit. I think the initial list was around 50 exhibit assets, which I thought would be a pretty big challenge but I felt up to the task. However, in true game-jam fashion that list quickly ballooned to right around 100 items. The scope creep was real 😆!

‎                     A small snippet of 'the list'

I knew that number was unachievable within the confines of a 72-hour game jam, so I had to make a decision: either I create a handful assets myself and supplement the rest with freely sourced assets (and opt out of the graphics category) OR go completely balls-to-the-wall and spend every waking minute making as many assets as humanly possible right up til the jam deadline, knowing full well I could never finish the list.

I went with the 2nd option. Perhaps it was pride, or I just really wanted to challenge myself, or maybe I've officially lost my marbles. Probably all three to be honest! But hey, that's what game jams are all about: having fun, challenging yourself, knowing that the odds are against you, and losing a small bit of your sanity along the way 🤪.

*Now, let's get to the fun stuff... *

The Art!

Environment Kit

So immediately after figuring out the core of the game I set out to start making the environment kit. I didn't know at the time if the environment level would be static, procedural/random, or some mix of the two. There was already some early discussion of some rooms being unlocked through gameplay, so I figured the safest bet would just be a simple modular environment kit that covered the essentials: some wall segments of different lengths, aesthetic variations of each size, a doorway, some doors, and a nice slightly-oversized pillar to tie up any ugly corners.

I knew from the start with all the assets I'd need to make later that any fancy PBR materials were out of the question due to time constraints. So figuring I'd be going with a more stylized/cartoony look I tried to accentuate some features in the design of the kit assets. I also figured that this would be one of (if not my only) chance to have some fun making actual textures - even if limited to only using the color map. So I popped over to substance painter and got to work.

‎               Trim Sheet (left) & Door/Frame/Floor texture (right)

After making my environment trim sheet I got to doing the UV's. I realized that I'd want the doorframe and doors to stand out a bit more so they got their own texture atlas as well, including the floor tile texture. By the time I wrapped up work on the environment, got everything imported to unity, and pushed it to the repo we were already 10 hours into the jam and I decided to call it a night so I could get an early start on the ever-growing list of assets.

So many assets...

                The first few exhibit assets that I made

After going through the list I started to tackle a few quick and easy ones to get an idea for how long they were taking me just on the modeling side of things. Things like the crystal ball, aether crystal, and kraken tentacle didn't take long to model at all since they were mostly made up of primitives and easy stuff like spline sweeps. Now I just needed to tackle the texturing aspect. My initial plan was for pure flat color, but since I'd need to make a texture atlas of colors anyway I took some time to make a pretty intricate one with many options for hue/saturation variety, as well as light/dark gradients. I also made a second atlas that was entirely made up of different color-to-color gradients (which I'd also use for an emissive map).

‎             Main Texture Atlas (left) & Secondary/Emissive Atlas (right)

With the first handful of assets modeled, my texture atlas's created, I did some quick UV's and got them in-engine. I think I also had made the exhibit bases for all of the different sizes around this time but it's honestly a bit of a blur. By the time I got everything pushed to the git repo we were already fast approaching the 24 hour mark! But hey, I had my workflow all set up and I was primed to tackle more things on the list!

So little time... 😬

After making a couple more quick assets and a quick chat with the team, I realized I needed to have a chat with our game designer @zavi-reinagel about what assets to focus on next. At that time the list was still getting revised, with some things being cut and others being added. Zavi asked me if there was anything specific I'd like to make that wasn't on the list. For whatever reason the first thing that popped into my head was those little model battle dioramas you see in history museums. I always found those fascinating. Zavi liked the idea and immediately added them to the list. I don't know if it was excitement, hubris, or the intoxication of the game jam atmosphere but what I said next was something really really stupid.

"I think they'll look super cool and they shouldn't really take me too long to make."

Well... I was half right.

Battle Models

These damned battle models. I love them. I hate them. Well, okay... I love how they turned out, and I hate how much time I spent on them. I got so swept up in making all the little details and trying to make each scene tell a story that I completely lost track of time. That happens a lot when I'm making art, which is normally a great thing, but in a game jam - not so much. These four assets took me 6 hours to make. In a game where going wide was the goal from the start, I utterly failed when making these. But dammit, they turned out so freaking cool. Oh well, live and learn. Or don't, it's just a game jam after all 😅

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End of Part 1

There's plenty more to talk about and a lot more assets to show. But until I get around to posting it please drop by our game page and give Genius Gallery a play!

Now I'm off to play a bunch of jam entries 😄

            Part 2

If you missed Part 1 of my postmortem you can read it here.

(Once again, if reading isn’t your thing and you just want to see the pretty pictures, scroll down 😉)

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By the time I had finished with the Battle Models it was already Saturday night and we were a good 30 hours into the jam. The environment kit and first 10 or so exhibit assets were finished. It wasn't a bad start, but time was ticking away and I still had the massive still-mostly-unfinished list staring at me. Thankfully by then the list was finalized and nicely sorted into groups, which was a huge help to me. This made it much easier to parse so I could eat away at it in chunks.

Since I had already spent the entire day at that point doing nothing but modeling, I really wanted something -anything- that would give me a break from staring at Maya's interface for a little bit. So I decided to start on the only exhibit assets on the list that would require actual texture work instead of using the texture atlases I made earlier.

Books & Scripts

I quickly modeled a map/chart that would work for the blueprint, treasure map, and star chart assets. Next I made a simple open book model. I also realized I'd want to make a quick display stand for these that would make more sense than the other exhibit bases I already had. After a quick UV layout for each of the two main models I could once again open up my beloved Substance Painter.

There's something about the texturing process that I've always loved more than just about any other aspect of creating a 3D asset. Modeling can certainly be enjoyable, but for me it's ultimately dependent on how interesting of an object it is and how complex the topology needs to be. Then of course there's unwrapping UV's, which I can't imagine anyone actually enjoys. It's a necessary evil as far as I'm concerned. And hey, if you happen to find it enjoyable... well good, but also, who hurt you 🤨? On the other hand, texturing is where I truly feel like I'm making art. It's the process where everything comes together and takes shape. The icing on the cake so to speak.

               Scripts texture atlas (left) & Books texture atlas (right)

Unfortunately texturing is also another place where I get way too wrapped up in what I'm doing and time melts away. I often find myself spending time on little details that no one will ever see or appreciate. Then again, I feel like part of creating art has to be for yourself. If you're not happy with what you make and you can't let yourself enjoy the process then what are you really doing it for?

My standard procedure when texturing multiple assets that use the same atlas is to bring them into painter as a group and texture them all at once, using folders with alpha masks to be able to work on one asset at a time while retaining the ability to export it as a single texture. I started off with the three scripts. For the blueprint I used a 3D voronoi fractal noise generator to get a quick blueprint style grid, then masked off the areas I didn't need. For the star chart I couldn't think of a quick way to make anything resembling a star chart without doing it by hand, and then I remembered that these things have existed for centuries so surely there would be something I could utilize for the texture that is free to use. And sure enough I quickly found a star chart from the 1800's and used it as a brush mask (public domain FTW!). The treasure map I ended up just drawing by hand—because I mean come on—who doesn't want to make their own treasure map?

The books were slightly more time consuming, but there were also six of them. After choosing different colors for the bindings that somewhat fit the theme for each of the books I went to Photoshop and make some text blocks using the tried and true 'lorem ipsum' with different fonts. Once again I knew this would never be seen, but dammit, I was in my zone!

               Some of the brush alphas I made for texturing the books

A few little symbols and scribbles later the books were all textured. I exported the atlases, brought them into Unity, set their respective materials and applied them to the models and I was done. Just like that I had 9 more exhibit assets ready to push to the git repo, and it was only.. oh god, it was 4 A.M.! Well, time flies when you're having fun. But we were now just a couple hours away from the mid-point of the jam and I had only completed 18 exhibit assets. Sure, that's not a small number, but it was still just a mere fraction of the list.

            Proof from the Git repo history that I was beginning to lose my mind

I knew I really had to kick things into gear. But approaching 5 in the morning is not the time to kick anything into gear unless you sleep in a race car bed. Despite not owning a race car bed, I still decided that it was time for sleep. I set an alarm for 3 hours, which I consider to be the bare minimum to remain functional for the next day.

Plants

Shortly after 8 in the morning I woke up from my ~~restful night of sleep~~ extended nap. After a quick shower and a few gulps of an energy drink I was ready to get back at it. After a quick scan of the list I immediate knew what I wanted to tackle next: plants! Not only were there a ton of them, a few of them would be simple re-colors. Plus I love any chance I get to make foliage. Every game jam I'm secretly hoping that the theme or idea our team chooses will be filled with excuses for me to create a ton of foliage. And finally, my time had come! Unfortunately they wouldn't be used in a fun way to propagate an environment with to make a lush forest or dense jungle, but I'll take what I can get.

Besides, in theory they shouldn't take terribly long to make. Just sweep some bendy splines, make a petal or two and rotate them around a central axis, slap a little stigma in the center and baby you got a ~~stew~~ plant going! But no! This was my excuse to create some truly killer plant assets. I had to make up for all the lost chances of jams past and make super detailed flowers, individually modeled after their real-world counterparts and all with a stylized flair that made them uniquely mine.

So sure, I spent a bit more time making the plants than I needed to. But I also lost an hour to a team meeting (where I struggled to focus because my brain was in full plant-creation mode) so it wasn't entirely my fault. And right when I was back in the groove I hit the one 'plant' in the list that I glossed over. Enter: the Mandrake.

                     Technically a plant, I guess.

I feel like I need to make one thing clear. I am not a character artist. While yes, I am a 3D artist, and yes I have made characters in the past, and yes they've usually turned out alright, I simply do not consider myself a character artist. I'm more of an environment, props, and interactables artist that is occasionally forced to create a character every now and then and I dread it every single time. It's just not my thing, especially if it's humanoid. Sure, I may have taken an anatomy class in college but that doesn't qualify me to be a surgeon. Character modeling is no different. It's a very specific area of study and people who are really good at doing it typically do just that. It's their thing. It's not my thing.

Now, could I have slapped a few elongated spheres together, haphazardly tossed some leaves on top and called it a day? Absolutely! Should I have done that? Well, the jury is still out on that one. But that's exactly what I started doing, and when I was so disappointed with how it looked I exported it and used it for a base mesh. It was that time again... the time during a game jam where I prove myself a liar and open up zBrush after swearing "I'm not going to use zBrush this time" at the start of the jam. I was so close to succeeding, but this stupid little potato monster sold my soul to the devil once again (yes I know it's not a potato).

So yeah, there went another whole hour on a single asset. But dammit if he isn't a cute little bastard. Of course I had absolutely no time for a proper high to low poly bake and retopo, so even after some decimation master magic he still weighs in at a hefty 7.4k tris. But I could at least take solace in knowing that a single slightly sub-optimized mesh wasn't going to affect performance, especially when the entire project only uses 5 texture maps across less than a dozen total materials.

So after finishing up the mandrake, I knocked out the last few plants pretty speedily as I didn't want to waste any more time. Thankfully a couple were just recolors. When I finally got everything in engine and pushed to the repo it was closing in on 5 P.M and I had another 11 exhibit assets ready. And it wasn't even close to being dark out yet!

Now that I was done with the plants I could move on to other things. I decided to knock out something easy that could be re-used, so I made a ship in a bottle by quickly modeling a bottle and sticking my pirate ship model from the naval battle diorama inside. I also exported a version of the bottle by itself standing up so that it could be used for the 'lightning in a bottle' asset. It would just need some VFX made, but hey that was finally something I didn't have to do on the art end of things!

I was locked at this point and just started going full steam ahead into the next category: Beast objects.

Beast Objects

I had already made the kraken tentacle from before the list got organized, so hey, I was already one asset down! Then it was a phoenix feather. A feather, that's it? Easy. DONE. A megalodon tooth? That's basically just a fat triangle. No problem at all! A dragon egg? Sure, that's just a stretched out sphere with some of the edge loops extruded to make it look kind of scaley. In hindsight I probably should have moved some of the vertices down to make it more scale-shaped but oh well. I was cooking and just banging out models at this point, so much so that I made a fancy little box for it to rest in, just because! A dragon claw? No prob—A DRAGON CLAW?! Dammit, not again... :sob:

Well at least it wasn't a full creature, just a hand, er... claw. Everyone knows hands are the easiest! (That's a joke for all you non-artists) Well at least zBrush was already open. After a truly hilariously poor attempt at modeling a base mesh of a claw I took it in zBrush and worked what little sculpting magic I had left in me. I think I spent around 40 minutes on it, which isn't terrible, but it was more time than I wanted to spend on a single asset right then.

After getting everything imported into Unity and pushing it all to the git repo I now had another 6 assets done, and it was actually only 8 P.M. this time. The night was young, I was up to 35 exhibit assets now, and was ready to burn the midnight oil!

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End of Part 2

There's still plenty more to talk about and a even more assets to show so stay tuned for Part 3. Until then, please drop by our game page and give Genius Gallery a play!

Now off to play and rate more jam entries! 🎉

            Part 3

If you missed Parts 1 or 2 of my postmortem, here are the links: - Part 1 - | - Part 2 -

(As always, if reading isn’t your thing and you just want to see the pretty pictures, scroll down 😉)

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When it rains, it pours

I'm sure some of you have had an experience like this before. The jam is going reasonably well, you're doing your best to keep things moving along as smoothly as possible. But right when you begin to feel comfortable, disaster strikes. Well that's exactly what happened to me on Sunday morning.

                  Personally, I blame the game jam gremlins.

Note: I should have included this section in my previous post, but unfortunately I got the date mixed up for which day this happened. I only realized this after going through my teams discord chat to grab the image above. Honestly the entire jam blended together so I've been relying on a combination of file save dates, github repo history, and discord to keep track of the order in which things happened.

Well when I woke up from my long nap and sat back down at my computer this was staring me in the face. This is not the kind of thing you want to start your day off on any day, let alone right when you're in the middle of a game jam. Now I'm fairly computer literate so I didn't panic immediately, but I definitely had an unsettling feeling in my stomach. As far as I could remember I never overclocked my RAM so this message didn't make sense. My first attempt was to pretend I didn't see it, do a hard shut down and turn it back on, hoping things would boot up like normal and that would be the end of it. After all, is says 'system is boot up with default settings', that sounds fine... default settings is fine, right?

Wrong. It booted up with the same error, because of course it wouldn't be that easy. So, I had to go into the BIOS and hope that I could change some settings until I could get it to start up. Multiple back-up plans were already going through my head. Maybe one of my sticks of RAM went bad, so I could try removing one? If that doesn't work I could swap it out with the other and try again? If neither of those things work, as a last resort I could always remove my hard drive, place it in an external enclosure and try to finish the jam using my laptop. I at least took comfort knowing that whatever the hell went wrong, I would not let it defeat me.

Thankfully after a few different cycles of changing a BIOS setting, restarting, reverting it back, and repeating the process with another setting I did it—I got it to boot up! I've never been so happy to see that stupid little windows loading circle, and it finally displayed the login screen. Crisis averted! And it only took me 12 minutes of troubleshooting. I could finally get back to work.

Later that day...

Getting back to where I left off at the end of Part 2, it was Sunday evening and I had just finished up some of the Beast assets. For whatever reason I skipped over the last few Beast items on the list and went straight into the Fantasy/Warfare category. As far as I can remember I was just looking forward to making a few cool looking fantasy weapons while I still had some creative energy left in me.

Fantasy Weapons

I started off with the shield since I knew the ice shield would be a simple recolor, plus if I made a buckler it's basically just a curved disc with some straps on the back. The fact that I was able to get those 2 assets done in under half an hour gave me a little more comfort to spend a bit more time on the rest of the weapons. The bow and fire arrow was a pretty quick job as well—just a duplicated spline sweep, a cylinder for the grip, long cylinder for the arrow shaft, salvaging part of the phoenix feather to create the fletching, and then I just had to make the arrow head. As simple as it is I feel like it turned out better than I expected.

I did however spend a good bit more time and detail on the glowing sword, magic staff, and thunder spear. I wanted to give them some more visual interest than just your bog standard medieval weapons. After all, these were supposed to be fantasy weapons. Sure the glowing sword is glowing, but it's got a double taper to the blade with a big ol' gem inside of it! That only makes sense in a fantasy setting. I followed suit with similar stylistic choices for the magic staff and whatever the hell a 'thunder spear' was supposed to be too. I was now sitting at 40 exhibit assets and it was right around 1 A.M., not bad at all. That left me enough ime to tackle some easy ones before my final few hours of sleep.

                  More beast items and some misc simple assets

I realized I had skipped over some of the beast items so I immediately started knocking those out. The unicorn horn was dead simple and kind of fun to texture since I was able to use the edges of the twisted tapered spline for the edge cuts on the UV. I'll have to remember that if I ever need to model a chocolate and vanilla twist ice cream cone. Then I knocked out the black ice gem in just a few minutes as it could just a simple re-color of the aether crystal. The giant pearl just felt too easy, as it's literally a sphere. At this point just dropping in a sphere and calling it a day felt wrong, so I took the dragon egg base and added some accent pieces for some visual variety. Next on the list was a dragonstone... but I had no clue what that was supposed to be. I noticed @zavi-reinagel was in the discord voice channel so I dropped in and our convo went a little something like this:

Zavi: What's up?

Me: Hey, uh... what's a dragon stone?

Zavi: »begins to describe a dragon stone«

Me: »interrupting« What if I just made a dragonball instead?

Zavi: ...

Zavi: OMG. That's way better.

Me: Heck yeah! We should change the rarity to 'Mythic' though.

Zavi: YES!

And that's how I got a dragonball into our game! 😆 Once again it was mostly just a sphere, but I went ahead and added the stars inside (even though they don't show up during gameplay 😩). I once again slightly changed up the base from the dragon egg/pearl, giving it a feel and color combo to fit the theme. After that I just had an 'unmelting ice cube', which I wasn't sure exactly how to go about. In theory I suppose it would be a perfect cube, but that felt wrong. So I rounded the corners and made it look like perhaps at one point it was beginning to melt and just decided 'ya know what, this melting this just isn't for me'. By the time I had wrapped up these assets it was now 3:30 A.M. and I had 6 more assets finished.

Still fueled by caffeine I figured I would knock out one more model before getting a few more hours of sleep and preparing for the final stretch of the jam. I didn't care if it was something that I spent a little more time on, as long as it looked cool. So I scanned the list for the perfect specimen: Fossilized Amber.

One hour later, it was done. I got all of the assets set up in Unity, made my final push to the git repo for the evening, and set off to grab my ~~40~~ ~~30~~ 25 winks. 😴

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End of Part 3

There's still the final day of the jam left to cover. I probably could have included it here but I felt like Part 2 was already longer than it needed to be, so I decided to break this one up. If you've been following these posts I apologize for making you wait one final time.

For anyone reading who hasn't yet, please drop by our game page and give Genius Gallery a play!

I'm once again off to play and rate more jam entries! Leave a comment if you'd like me to play yours!