Game Jam: Hamster Hyperdrive

After working on Slime Control: The Goo Getaway and graduating from Hollywood Animation Academy, I was eager to put my game animation skills to the test in an actual game design pipeline. So when Claire Wilshire (aka. Nivarian) called for an animator to help with their submission to the 5-day GameMaker Toolkit (GMTK) Game Jam, I answered. While I was at work during the initial meeting, I made sure to get caught up that evening, and learned that our game was going to be a Tron-esque game about hamsters fighting computer bugs by drawing loops around them.

The task was simple: animate walk cycles for a player character and three distinct insectoid enemies. Things got a little tricky, however, when I realized the models our resident 3D artist sent me did not have any skeletal rigs, and I could not begin animating without them. In order to overcome this obstacle (and lighten the hefty load on our 3D artist), I spent the entirety of the first day of the jam learning how to create skeletal rigs and attaching them to the character meshes - a process that went much more smoothly than I would have imagined! Over the course of the next two days, I proceeded to knock out the four animations and even helped out with the VFX for the game, including the light trail behind the main character and the explosion that occurs when an enemy is defeated. I spent the last two days troubleshooting animation import issues and making myself available to whatever tasks needed doing before the game was submitted.

Overall, for such a short time frame, the team did a fantastic job with the game - Hamster Hyperdrive ranked 36th in popularity out of over 9,500 entries, putting it in the top 0.372%! When I presented my work after drafting each one, my animations were met with praise from the project lead and the rest of the team alike! If we had more time, I would have loved to create more character animations for the game, including idle animations for the player and enemies as well as attack animations for the projectile-spewing bugs. I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to be a part of a game design pipeline for the first time since completing my education, and I would relish the opportunity to be a part of a team like this again in the future - even if only for another five days!