This was my first Global Game Jam (GGJ), and unlike the Ludum Dare challenge, GGJ jams are a lot more relaxed since there are no judging guidelines. Although, this jam was a little tough for me because I had a lot going on that weekend and didn't get to work on the artwork as much as I had hoped to. Luckily, I did have an art style that I wanted to pursue and came prepared with what I wanted the game to look like, so there were barely any time setback for research. I did however, had to research environmental art to draw inspiration from because I was still relatively new to the "Low Poly" art style. While my partner is writing up a postmortem, you can check out all the art assets I've created for this weekend's game project linked through my portfolio page and play the game here: Party Squatch!
A major positive point that I got out of this Jam was file compression, which helps a lot with loading time. Since, I solely worked in Illustrator (AI) to create all the artworks, I was able to save all PNG files directly from AI without transferring them to Photoshop (PS) like before. If you take notice, this game loads a lot faster than our previous titles and runs pretty smooth on the Web version as well. The reason why I used to work with AI and PS simultaneously before was due to animation layouts. In which, AI has no controls.
On the other hand, like the other game jams, I did not get to see much of the game until the end. This process a problem because as both the Concept Artist and Level Designer, I can visualize how I want the game to look with my art assets better than my Programmer, Barry, whom was put in charge of laying out the level and thus, we had to go back and forth several times to dress up the level because it did not look right. So, at the moment we are discussing on building some type of level editor where I can layout a game's look and feel while Barry and other programmers can focus on the mechanics without interruptions.