#brobots

Brackeys Game Jam 2021

In the the second to last week of February, the 15th to the 22nd, Nate, Matt and I took part in the Brackeys Game Jam 2021.1. Game Jams are commonly known as 48 hours where participants have to create a game from scratch, but this one was slightly different as we were given one week to make our own unique video game.

We entered this Game Jam as all three of us are very passionate about game making and wanted to grow our skills in this area, while also mentally preparing us to get back into university as it was just around the corner. 

As all three of us had been in a group together before and thanks to everything we’ve learnt from Creative Technologies, we had a huge advantage, as we knew all of our individual strengths and we used methods that had been taught to us to efficiently sort through ideas. We crafted a google doc for our ideas to compile them together, and used discord as a means of communication. We had our meetings on Discord from 10:00 AM to roughly 5:00 PM every single day of the week, but more than often we kept working in our own time to get our tasks completed. These seven days were the longest hours I’ve worked in my life. 

Our ideas we sorted through:

We went through our ideas using the different coloured hats, which helped us sort through us favourite ideas for the next stage, which was to vote. We didn’t want to take too much time deciding what idea we would choose as we needed to be as fast and efficient as possible. The theme for the Game Jam was ‘Stronger Together’, so we made sure to take that into account which games best match the theme when we each voted.

The Lucky Concept Winner

The game concept which had the highest amount of votes was a concept we were referring to as ‘Bomb Bros’. We chose this as we thought it checked off all the boxes. It was do-able in the amount of time we had, it would be fun and interactive, and it had a deeper meaning and perfectly matched the theme ‘Stronger Together’. The way we wanted this game to work was to have two characters which both had bombs attached to them, the characters were connected with a magnetic link and when they players were too far away from each another they trigger a countdown then eventually explode, the catch was that the players would have lots of obstacles and puzzles that they had to go through, some would force the players to have to seperate from one another.  Originally we envisioned our game to be multiplayer, but as the Game Jam was marked by other participants we had to think of a more simplified version which allowed someone to play the game single player, but switch between the two characters. We also scrapped the magnetic link, as we wanted the player to always be pressured by a timer that would explode if they didn’t make it to the next checkpoint with both playable characters in time.  Over time, naturally our game concept slowly changed and adapted to what we are currently calling ‘BroBots’. 

Creating BroBots

Once all the planning through Google Docs and Trello was completed, we begun the making stage. Nate and Matt were the developers and had different jobs they had to complete, while my job was to complete all of the required 3D models, rigging/animating and level design which I will be including seperate blog posts for those.

Prototypes

Robot models completed + Player movement script

Rag-dolling + Obstacles working

Gameplay

BroBots Play-through

or as I like to call them Brobots.

@comicsalliance​ announces BROBOTS, VOLUME 2: BROBOTS AND THE MECHA MALARKEY and interviews creators @jtorrescomics-blog​ @andthankyouforflying​!

BROBOTS, VOLUME 1: BROBOTS AND THE KAIJU KERFUFFLE is available now at local comic book shops, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, ComiXology, Google Play, iBooks, and at the Oni Press Shopify store.

BROBOTS, VOLUME 2: BROBOTS AND THE MECHA MALARKEY will be available for order at local comic book shops starting on March 29, 2017.

Find your local comic book shop with findacomicshop.com or comicshoplocator.com.

This is peak irony. This is an AI generated image.

From here: https://x.com/fabianstelzer/status/1805326251344691598