This years 48h Global Game Jam theme was “Repair” so our team put together and idea to make a World War Z style zombie survival Tower Defence game, where the player would have to fight off hoards of fast moving zombies that pile up on the walls, by creating and upgrading offensive weapons while repairing their base as long as they can…
This was the first time I had participated in a game jam and had never participated in game design at all. Lucky for me, I was invited to join a team of professional game designers from Estoty. They are a company that creates top-selling casual mobile games and the team wanted to try their hands on a bigger scale project using a new technology - ECT DOTS, that allows to work with massive amounts of entities.
The plan turned out way too ambitious for the scope of 48h and we learnt that ECS is not quite ready for a project like this. It is soon to be implemented into Unity, so we will see how it developes in the future.
Overall, this was a fantastic experience and allowed me to meet many artists, developers and game designers that I normally wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to in my daily job. I think I also was able to break a lot of misconceptions about SketchUp in our game design community, showing how versatile of a tool SketchUp can be.
Working in gaming software (mods) natively will result in much cleaner files. Importing and exporting isn’t a magic solution, just as importing a max file into SketchUp results in messy meshes and large files.
Nobody will hire you because you are adamant about the power of SketchUp. Knowing the existing applications that developers use will help you get hired. Examine job postings to see what skills are required, and educate yourself.
You do need knowledge of industry software to be a viable prospect for studios with established pipelines. Models that come out of Sketchup are as clean as you make them, and indie studios are just looking for problem solvers that can perform a task.
The polygons don’t care where they came from, and if something can be made faster in Sketchup than other software, the designers won’t care where the polygons came from either.
Now that my vacation has started, decided to have another game jam. This time with my brother who is learning to code in Unity and I’m working on all asset design, UI, UX.
It’s a flat-shaded 3d survival rpg. The progress has been very good so far. Hope you can test yourself by the end of summer.
