Salpakurki

The Idea

Our team Päärynäinen hääyöaie (Peary wedding night intention) attended the Xamk International Gamejam 2022, which was the first international gamejam held by the Brazilian university UNIVALI and the Finnish university Xamk. This was the first gamejam I've ever attended at, and this was the first game I've made with a team. We had to make a game in 48 hours, and the theme was "assembly and disassembly". The gamejam started on Friday, 23rd of September at 6 pm and ended of Sunday the 25th at 6 pm.

We started with a mind map and wrote out anything that came onto our minds related to the theme. One of our team members had the idea of disassembling objects in the world for buildable assets (e.g. streetlamps for copper wire). I also had an idea to make a parody game of the TV series "Breaking Bad", with humorous elements. We started to adapt those ideas into a game and we discussed about the game mechanics and the gameplay in general. Then we decided who did what in the project: Niko would handle the programming since he was the only one who had any experience with it, Kaspian would do 3D-modeling of the buildings and cars, Jimi would program some simple stuff and make a map and I'd take on 3D-modeling and texturing and the character design, since I had around two years of experience in Blender.

The Game Design

First, I made a quick 3D model scetch of the game idea and how we should do the gameplay. Then I started 3D modeling and texturing the game assets in Blender: I modeled a bottle, a tap, a portable stove, a gas mask, a catalytic converter, duct tape and some copper wire and hose. These were low poly models with simple textures and colors, since that's the aesthetic we were set on. Other members of the team made models for the enviroment: city buildings, cars, street lamps, etc. We had a sole coder for the game jam, who made putting the game together in Unity possible.

On Saturday I started character modeling from scratch. I haven't done a character model from the ground up, only edited already existing models, so I had to learn that. I used a video tutorial by PIXXO 3D to make the model itself. Then I marked seams and UV unwrapped the model, following that by texturing it. I've usually done texture editing through GIMP, but this time I tried the built-in texture editor in Blender and it was pretty decent for this type of job. Finally, I tried to rig the model, but I had some problems with Blender's owan rigify tool. The rig behaved incorrectly and weight painting would've taken a lot of time to learn, so I rigged the model automatically with the help of Adobe Mixamo. The rig finally worked fine and Mixamo saved me from a lot of headaches.

This character we named "Jesse", our main (playable) character. Next, I modified the model and the textures and made Valtteri, who was our antagonist.

I was pretty much done with 3D modeling at this point, and our project was nearing playability. I sent the models to our project manager and he imported the models to Unity. I then participated on doing the voice acting for our game and edited the audio, making the antagonist more "intimidating".

The Failure

The final day of the gamejam arrived. We had made a lot of progress with our game, and it was at a playable state. I really didn't have too much to do, since I couldn't help with coding stuff, but I made a start screen in GIMP and tried to make an UI for the start screen in Unity.

Two hours before the end of the gamejam, we were making the finishing touches to the game, like applying the start and end screen. Suddendly, Unity gave shader errors and crashed the project. Turns out that the whole project got corrupted and the game couldn't be recovered in time, so we had to cut our losses and not submit a game at all. We were really disappointed that our hard work suddendly just went down the drain.

In the end, the only thing we submitted was this video I rendered:

The Gameplay

Unfortunately there isn't any screenshots or video material of the working game, but I'll briefly describe the gameplay.

Our game featured the main character Jesse, who wants to build a game lab out of "loaned" components. You'll find the needed components from all over the town of Salpakurki, a town very reminicent of Kouvola judging by its architecture.

Of course, you wouldn't get the necessary parts easily. That's why the game has a threatening antagontist Valtteri, who'll chase you down and will make you pay the consequences of destroying public property. Well, at least that was the idea, but we didn't get to implement the game over mechanic, so Valtteri would just hover and zoom around the player while T-posing and calling out for Jesse.

The Learning Experience

There was a lot to learn from being a first-timer at a gamejam: how to work effectively in a thight time limit, how much time goes into modeling assets, how to use texture painting in Blender, how to make a character and the problems that can occur while rigging it. In the future, I need to work on my workflow and learn more about character modeling and rigging in general, so I'd be more prepared if I need to design a character.

I also enjoyed doing teamwork: communicating, planning, working together, helping and supporting others. And the biggest thing we learned was how version control is really important: You should preferably use Git or something else than Microsoft OneDrive to save your Unity project. It's not fun to lose progress on your work, but it's not the end of the world if mistakes happen.

Overall, it was a nice learning experience, and something that I'd love to participate again!

(PS. Here's a video of a small school project where I used the models I created)

The Continuation of the Project

In 2024, Kaspian started on reviving and fixing our broken game. So, a fixed game, "Salpakurki Redux", might come out someday!