Dental Damnation

The Idea

Finnish Game Jam 2023 was my third game jam experience, with a time limit of 48 hours. The theme was ‘Roots’. Our team was called 'Money Flaw'. We had a large team of friends attending the jam, and we had some trouble communicating what we wanted for the game. We thought about games with trees, plants, family or teeth, all things related to roots. We came up with an idea about a game called ”Dental Damnation” where a tooth defends other teeth by shooting ”tooth goblins” with toothpaste. We really didn’t have a concrete plan or a design document, not even any drawings to communicate what kind of game it will be. Some thought it would be 2D, some mix between 2D and 3D and some fully 3D. Predictably, this gave us problems down the line.

The Game Design

We started developing assets, characters, art and the arena. We didn’t have unified plans, so everyone did their own thing. For the arena I modelled a real looking mouth and teeth in Blender. I used pictures of dentures and plastic models as a reference. The next day I used Blender’s in-built texture painting tool to texture the mouth. I was surprised about the outcome of the arena model and was pleased with the results.

We had trouble implementing the 2D assets to 3D world, and our sole programmer had a meltdown trying to figure everything out. I think everyone had some sort of mental breakdown during the jam, since some people had a lot to do and some didn’t, or their work couldn’t be implemented at all. A lot of us were still inexperienced working in Unity and programming, and we didn’t know all of the features of the engine.

We recorded some sounds for the game with my friend, using a Blue Yeti microphone and Audacity. We used the silent phone booth as our recording studio to get a crisp sound. We wanted damage sound effects to our game, so we recorded different crunches by eating apples and hard candy. Then, we spliced the audio to single clips and cleaned them up. However, we didn’t get to implement these sound effects at all. We didn’t know how to, but now I know we should’ve made an audio manager to easily access our audio. We drank too many free energy drinks and played some games since me and my friend didn’t have anything else to do.

We stayed awake until morning. During the morning of the last day of the Jam, while I went to sleep, our brave programmer scrapped our progress and made a new game from scratch, this time making it in 2D. The end of the jam is a hazy memory. I really don’t remember how it went, but I believe we got a game out of it thanks to our programmer.

The Gameplay

The player plays as a tooth (Solid Tooth). The mission is to protect your fellow teeth from evil candy monsters using toothpaste as a weapon. The game is a top down shooter with endless waves of enemies. The player aims and shoots with a mouse and moves with WASD. If hit, enemies get killed instantly by the toothpaste projectile. The player has limited health, and when defeated, the game returns to main menu.

The Learning Experience

We had a big team, but our management of the team wasn’t optimal. Maybe the team was a bit too big for a jam like this, and the team dynamics didn’t work out didn’t work as well as we thought. After the jam, we concluded that really should’ve communicated with each other more clearly and have balanced roles. We should’ve laid out a plan for the game, some sort of a game design document so everyone would have unified understanding of the game and tasks. Our source control on the other hand went well and we didn’t have too many problems with that.

I learned some interesting modelling techniques and utilizing the texture painting tool in Blender. This was also one of my first times trying out audio production for a game. Recording sound effects was a fun process, and I’m intrigued to learn more about audio design in games. Overall, this was an important lesson in game design and creation, as now I have a better understanding for how game jams should be approached.