Life As We Know It
Life As We Know It is a resource management survival game set on a hostile planet, where you must overcome the environment and its inhabitants to refuel your ship.
The game was made over the course of a week with a group of friends for the Epic Mega Jam. The theme for this jam was “Down to Earth” which we decided to take literally. Our team was a bit cocky approaching this game, already used to making games within 48 hours, with this one coming off of the trail of Nan Turismo.
The game included an inventory system, combat mechanics, mining and refining materials, building mechanics and objectives. The team went about creating an idea in a way where each member went over an aspect of game creation that they wanted to explore.
Development Info
Project: 2020 Epic Mega Jam
Start Date: November 2019
Team Size: 5
Role: Co-Lead, 3D Artist
Project Length: 1 Week
Software Used: Unreal Engine 4, Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter/Designer, Photshop, Mixamo
Role/Responsibilities
For this project all I had to do was provide 3D assets, mostly for the character models and to experiment with animation for the first time. I ended up contributing a lot to the environmental assets too as our scope ended up being fairly large and they were a higher priority than the character models.
During this project I had to make the decision to cut scope as multiple members of our group were burning out trying to complete this project.
What Went Right
We made a beautiful game, the environment looked great and I was proud of our team.
We accomplished much of what we set out to do despite the scope of the project being wildly too much for us to do within a week.
What Went Wrong
Too much scope for this project, each member of the group took on more work than they could handle to try and finish this project.
Our Blueprinter broke after spending 2 days and nights getting an inventory system to work with crafting.
I had to remake character models multiple times to fit the game for both the player character and the enemies. Whilst these were finished the team wasn’t able to get them in the game ready for submission time.
We had no time to make sure the game was polished.
What I Learned
While we were proud of what we managed to create by the end of this game jam, it was a huge lesson in humility. We tackled too much in too short a time span due to confidence gained from other projects.
We needed to sit down to discuss what each other was working on some more, there were definite areas of overlap in this project and a lot of time could have been saved with better communication.
