Kakku-Ukko

The Idea

It has been a while since my last game jam, being busy with school’s courses. I was interested to jam again, this time with a much more relaxed setting and a smaller team. My goal for this jam was to just take it easy and make a small game, hopefully finishing it. We’ve been talking about this with my friend, so we joined our forces and decided to attend just with a two-person team. A challenge, for sure, but nothing impossible. We called ourselves “Tmi. Puuhamiehet” (loosely translated to Trade Name Workmen).

There were two themes, as there were two different Xamk Game Jam sites. Choices were “Building” and “Volunteer cruise”. We decided to focus our game to be about building. Again, we had only 48 hours to make a game. We ideated a bit, and wanted to incorporate our new campus to it, since this was the last jam at our old campus. Thinking about what we should build, I had an idea from Princess Peach: Showtime! where Peach bakes a cake bit by bit. So, in our game was an old construction builder, not too dissimilar to Mario, finding a new job as a baker.

The Game Design

We wanted to keep the scope of the game very small and simple, since only the two of us were developing the game. Our idea was to make a small puzzle-type game that had a time limit. The player would fit the cake layers to their silhouettes. The aim for the visuals was to make a little scuffed, Microsoft Paint styled art, and give a feeling of an old Flash game. We decided to use Unity Engine for the game engine and GitHub for version control. Iina worked mostly on the programming part of the game, while I made the character design, background image and the 2D-sprites for the table and conveyor belts.

I made basic concept sketches of the character, discussed about it with Iina and made a draft of the character sprite. I wanted the character to be a grizzly, hardened construction worker, while also being soft and not intimidating. The character has a lot of round shapes, making it friendlier. He has ill-fitting (construction) clothes, a stubble, grey moustache, a hardhat with a small baker’s hat on top of it and he is smoking a cigarette. A true working man. Then, after finalizing the base character, I made variations of different moods of the character, such as angry, happy, and blinking.

Iina made quick progress with the programming of the game, as she made the basic gameplay mechanics. She also made the cake pieces as well, and started working on the comic cutscene at the start of the game. We decided to name our project and the game “Kakku-Ukko”, meaning Cake Geezer. We chose it because the name is fun to pronounce, and the name is quite literal to the game.

We wanted to incorporate sounds and audio design for this game as well since our previous projects has had a distinct lack of music and sounds. It is a surprisingly important part of games, but are often neglected or are an afterthought, especially for game jam games. I had an ongoing audio design course and I wanted to utilize the skills learned from the course. We needed voice acting for the character, different music for each scene, and sound effects for the different elements of the game. We had an idea about casting Iina’s SO’s voice, since he is actually a manual labourer himself and often curses like a stereotypical Finnish working man. A perfect fit for the role.

As Iina recorded the lines for me, I searched for the best available sounds for the game. They needed to fit for the action and be available to be used freely. Using ready-made sounds also cut time on recording or Foleying the sounds. I searched Freesound.org for license-free sound effects and after searching for a while found pretty good matches for what effects I was planning for. Mechanical sounds for the conveyor belt and some splatting sounds for picking up and placing the cakes. They were also used for the UI sounds, too.

Now I had the basis for the sound effects, but I had to edit most of them to fit for the intended use better. I used Audacity as it’s a free and simple tool to use. Although it’s not professional and quite limited, it was good enough for quick audio editing. For the conveyor belt sound, I mixed two different sound effects together and adjusted their levels to match each other. I made two variations for the conveyor belt sound effect to make it less repetitive. I adjusted the splat sounds as well, changing the pitch and equalizing the sound.

The voice acting tracks by Iina were now finished, and I needed to edit those, too. And they delivered, I really liked the voice lines. Unfortunately, the quality of the microphone wasn’t good and therefore the quality of the sound suffered from that. Well, one has to make do and use the available equipment the best way they can. I tried to salvage the voice acting to the best of my abilities, and it wasn’t an important matter if the quality wasn’t the best. Compressing, equalizing, and adding some light effects saved some of the voice acting to make it usable in the game. The, I separated the voice lines as separate clips.

I personally have very little experience of creating music, so I needed to search for free-to-use music for the game as well. I wanted to have a chill and soft music to reflect the softness of the game. I found a visual novel music pack by Rest! to use freely in games. The piano atmosphere gives a soothing feeling to the starting screen, melancholic but dreamlike music gives the comic cutscene a nice mood boost, and the rhythmic upbeat in-game music keeps the player pumped up for the ‘cake building’ gameplay. The pack had a surprising variety, and it was good to use similarly themed music for consistency.

Iina made a lot of progress, and we were making finishing touches. She made the logo and title/end screens, while I found a fitting free-to-use font and made the UI graphics, splash screen, and the icon for the game. Iina had also made the itch.io page for the game to publish it. We put everything together and finished our game on time, with no stress. A generally playable game with a start and an ending, is related to the theme of the jam, has sounds and consistent graphics and is actually finished and submitted an hour before the deadline. I have to say, I’m very proud of what we could achieve as a two-person team.

The Gameplay

Our main character is Ukko, an old, disgruntled construction worker who has been laid off from his job after finishing building the new campus. Depressed, he wanders on and stumbles upon a local cake factory. Stunned by the revelation and lit by his passion, he finds a new calling for his life as a baker. Despite being a grizzly grudging geezer, he still has a warm heart of gold and wants to make people happy. Maybe he can utilize his skills in construction to build cakes for people?

Player’s goal is to stack as many cakes as possible within a one-minute time limit. Cakes are made out of pieces that corresponds to a silhouette of the said piece, and tee player needs to connect three pieces to make one cake. Ukko will give positive feedback when done correctly but will curse if placed wrong. The game is high-score based and there is no set of cakes that must be done.

The Learning Experience

I did things I haven’t done before in a game jam, like audio design. It was nice to try new things and learn new stuff, get new perspectives of game development. Team management wasn’t an issue this time, but for a two-person team we both had more roles and responsibilities. Iina carried a lot of those responsibilities, doing the programming by herself and creating art as well, and I appreciate her hard-working attitude towards this jam. It's because of her dedication we could bring this game to light!

We had an added challenge of working remotely, but communication between us worked very well. I think it was an advantage: if the team was larger, communication could be way harder, and the jam project would’ve had a way bigger scope, possibly making the game unfinished. The smaller team limited our options and scaled the scope of our game down, which in turn ensured we could finish a game. Overall, a very nice experience and being wiser from the previous jams we didn’t make the same mistakes.

I love the little details we added to the game, like the cake shovel/trowel as a cursor, cake-themed UI, and the baker’s hat on Ukko’s helmet. It’s a fun relaxing game, although very simple, but still creative and humorous in nature. Voice acting is great despite the quality, it enhances the game. The sound balance is a little off, as some sounds are a bit loud, and sounds sometimes stack together. The game can be bugged as well, and the animations could move the character up. Despite these small problems, the game is surprisingly good and overall presentation is nice.