Making Iron Rations: My Second Game Jam
Iron Rations gameplay
From left to right: Eric Yu (me), Austin Garcia, Lisa Lo, Adrian Biagioli, Trento von Lindenberg, and Thomas Wrabetz.
Iron Rations is a bullet hell game that takes place during a fictional futuristic war, created for the Global Game Jam in Pittsburgh. In keeping with 2020’s theme of “Repair,” you play as a robot, trying to repair items to sell in order to escape the war torn planet. However, as the battle rages on, you must avoid the gunfire, while also playing mini-games to repair the items to sell.
The team consisted of myself (Art Lead), Austin Garcia (2D Artist), Lisa Lo (3D Artist), Adrian Biagioli (Programmer), Trento von Lindenberg (Game Producer/Sound), Thomas Wrabetz (Programmer).
Not only did we have fun developing our game, but we we also won the Artistic Excellence award!
We won the Artistic Excellence award!
Close-up of the Artistic Excellence award.
We were interested in making a hybrid game, where you had to focus on two actions at one time. Some of us were fans of bullet hell games, so we decided to make that one of the actions. The theme of “Repair” brought ideas of robots, where you could gain health by acquiring scrap. This would be our second action. Bullet Hells inspired ideas of machine gun fire. Thus, our story/theme of a WW1-esque dystopian sci-fi war game was born.
Games and movies we looked at for inspiration for the art included Killzone, Battlefield 1, Wall-E, and This War of Mine. We also looked at Journey, in regards to the design of the main robot character.
Killzone inspired us on the setting and soldiers.
Journey helped to influence the style of the robot.
For the designs of the characters, we wanted to evoke that old technological look, where the past meets the future. As such, for the soldiers we went for a WW1-inspired look. For the main robot character, we wanted it to seem like it was comprised of different looking parts. We also wanted to give the character a cloak of some kind, to accentuate the raggedness of the character.
Concept art of the soldiers.
Concept Art of the player character.
Our game would primarily be in 3D, and we used a Unity shader called Toon Standard, developed by one of our programmers, Adrian Biagioli. We wanted the game to be dark, with illumination coming from the bullets and the characters’ eyes. We primarily used Substance Painter for textures (we watched this video on stylized art a lot), and Maya for modeling.
Prototype gameplay
For character animation, we rigged and animated our characters with Mixamo, which was exceptionally useful for our 48 hour crunch.
3D model of a soldier.
All in all, this experience was so much fun. It was a great opportunity to explore different styles of 3D art, as well as giving me experience in teaching others how to model and texture. Plus, we managed to sleep both nights, which I consider a huge step forward. Given how awesome all the other games look, we felt honored to be chosen for the Artistic Excellence award.
Another awesome Game Jam is in the books. Let’s see what Game Jam 2021 has in store.
For a more detailed look at our game, check out this link!