David here from inbetweengames. After giving everybody a bit of time to maybe check out our game ‘The Mammoth: A Cave Painting‘ and reading the awesome comments on the page, I wanted to talk with you guys a bit about the interpretation of the theme that we decided for. This is going to be somewhat of a spoilerfest so if you want to check out our game with fresh eyes best do it now before reading this. We’ll be waiting here.
Want to watch 3 days of coding in 10 minutes? Here’s a timelapse video of inbetweengames’ Isaac Ashdown writing the gameplay and UI code for The Mammoth in Unreal Engine 4:
All of the team currently work at YAGER in their day jobs, where we’ve been using UE4 for several years on a AAA project that was recently cancelled. We thought it would be interesting to see what we could pull off in the engine in just 3 days, which for us is a pretty big change of pace compared to our normal way of working. We’re really happy with how it turned out!
We created the entire game, including the concept, in the 3 days of the jam. Beforehand we did some prep for some of the systems we knew we’d need for the game we wanted to create: a custom 2D flipbook material that allows us to animate sprites similar to Paper2D while giving us the full functionality of Unreal’s material editor; controls for a top-down or “isometric”-style game; and finally a basic framework for flocking/crowd AI. This last system was pretty heavily hacked up to create the AI for the hunters and mammoth babies.
We’ve been relaxing a little since the jam ended, but now we’re ready to start playing and rating some games! We aim to rate every video game that leaves us a comment on our page, so play and rate The Mammoth: A Cave Painting now: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56968
