Player Graphics - A Game Jam Game - And a Completely New Game

I've been very busy since I came back from Denmark. When I came back there was a week until I was going to a game jam in Dublin, so I really wanted to put some nice work into the game that I could show off, so I mostly finished the player graphics and got them in the game.

After that it was onto the Game Jam where I worked on a small game on my own. The theme of the Game Jam was "Snow" and I ended up making a game where you are running around as a wood burning stove shooting coals at evil snowmen to defeat them.

It was a fun game to make and I'm pretty happy with how much I could manage to get done on my own in 8 hours, but I also think I made a bit of a mistake in making the game in 2D graphics using the same tools and packages I've been using for my current game, because even though I was very quick, it didn't really give me a change to try something new and crazy.

After the Game Jam, I felt empowered to try something crazy and decided to put my current project on hold for a week or two and see if I could make a tiny game and publish it no matter how broken it ended up being.

Enter Cretaceous Cravings! This was the rebirth of an old project I had worked on, though I started over from scratch with a clean project and new assets.

The idea was very simple. You are a dinosaur and to grow bigger you need to eat other dinosaurs that are smaller than you and avoid dinosaurs that are bigger than you.

I tried to go for a bit of a different art style. Using unlit shaders that displayed two different painted textures, based on the "light" direction you set on them. I think the effect was cool, but I'm not sure I really had the time to dial in the assets and textures for the look to shine. Part of the reason I went for this look was that I wanted the game to run really well, so I didn't want any real time lighting. This also gave me the chance to work with the Scriptable Render Pipeline and use the Shader Graph to make my custom materials which was a lot of fun.

In the end I just completely ran out of time. There are a million things I want to improve, but I forced myself to get it to a "complete" state where I could put it out and then I published it on Google Play.

The great thing is that now it's there and I feel like I could easily post small updates that would be big improvements.

I also made screen recordings of the entire process of making the game, so I'm hoping to make another "Making Of" doc video from that.

Well that's all from me now. I'll take some Christmas relaxation now and then decide what project to jump into when I've had a bit of time to calm down.