This past weekend. August 13th -15th was the NM GameJam Where Animators, artists, and programmers in New Mexico formed teams to create the best video game they can in under 48 hours. There were 3 locations for this years GameJam. Albuquerque, Las Cruces, and Santa Fe. I found out about this litterally one week before from my good friend Ryan Leonski from Subliminal Gaming. Everyone assembles at their location at 5pm to meet with people, and talk about their interests and skills, then to form teams based off that. We already had our team before we came, so we met with everyone, but we stuck together and kept our team intact, which we call “Papa Pixel”
Our team consisted of
Nialls Chavez – Programmer
Ryan Leonski – Programmer
Shandin Woodward – Environment Artist
Bryan Tenorio – character Animator
All the teams were given 3 keywords, 2 of which needed to be implemented into their game. This year’s keywords were Outlaw, Wicked, and Shrink We used the words Outlaw, and Shrink about as literally as we could. Our game is called “The Shrinking of Outlaw Bill” It’s a stealth, platformer. You are an outlaw who has the ability to shrink. So you must steal gold from people in the desert, whilst staying out of sight.
At the end of the third level there is a boss, but instead of fighting him you must shrink and climb up to steal the gold from his pocket!
I did the character animations for the main character, as well as all the enemies. Outlaw Bill was the first character I worked on. First I modeled him in Blender. I kept the model pretty low poly, since a lot of the detail would have been lost anyways. Then after I rigged him, I did all the animations. The other characters were based off of the original model, and used the same rig. This saved me lots more time than if I were to make each character from scratch.
For this game we did 2D, so even though I was doing my characters in 3D That wasn’t a problem. I simply rendered out each frame and made sprites for all the animations which would then be put into the game. This is how they created many older games such as Donkey Kong country, and Toy Story for the SNES.
You can download the game here!
My name is Bryan Tenorio. I'm a 3D Artist and Animator. I had the idea to do a blog posting my projects along with descriptions of how they went. I also plan on creating some tutorials. (I take requests), giving out free models, rigs, textures... I will also occasionally be posting inspiration as well as some motivation. Some good things are coming in the near future, so stay tuned and keep checking back!
That is beautiful, did you do you modeling in Blender?
Yeah. I did all the characters in Blender. I actually like Blender a lot better than most of the commercial software out there. I see you’re a programmer. I recently had the desire to learn how to use Unity3d, and to learn programming so I can make my own games. My friend is teaching me C#, but all the tutorials for Unity3D are in Javascript. That might be a little tough, but maybe I can learn both.
I just learned about unity at the GameJam, and I’ve been immersed in it since. Javascript is one of the easiest languages to learn as well as c#. Its not so much as learning the syntax of the language, that’s the easy part. Its learning the functionality and libraries that are accessible from your language.
good job dude