Buds Travel Sim
About the Game
A fun 2D hyper-casual travel simulator. Go on a trip with the AirAsia Buds as you play as Biggie to meet and balance everyone's needs.
Successfully visit all 8 cities while satisfying the buds to win the game. Satisfying buds requires players to do an activity in a city. Each activity drains stamina but if a bud is satisfied with that activity, then they will gain stamina. Figure out which buds prefer what and try to keep their stamina afloat to prevent going home and losing the game.
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Game Engine
Design Process
Concepting
Attending my second ever Game Jam, I had already started to concept some minor ideas with my team to try and guess what the theme we will get. This particular Game Jam was hosted by AirAsia and sponsored by a lot of companies like Sega and Sony. It was more of an intense competition where the grand prize winners would be able to go to Japan.
The theme given to us for the Game Jam was AirAsia Buds, essentially we needed to incorporate AirAsia's mascots into our game, which also has to be a hyper-casual game as the game will eventually be put on AirAsia's official app, hence it had to be a mobile game, while also being able to be played on the web. Learning from my past mistakes of my first Game Jam, I worked more closely with my team as we all discussed how we should approach this as well as what kind of hyper-casual game can we make.
Pre-Production
This time around, I wasn't the only designer in the group, therefore I didn't have to carry all on the design. We suggested a few kinds of games like a fighting game similar to Smash-Bros, and a dating sim but instead of dating characters you would instead be befriending them and getting close to them, turning it into more of a friend sim or bro sim. However, the idea that we all could agree upon is a travel sim and we started to delegate task from there. Also during this stage, we decided to not utilize the commercialization route because not only was it optional, we felt like we wouldn't have enough time to implement those.
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A Google Sheet was made to plan out schedules and delegate tasks​ (incomplete)
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A Google Doc was created to formulate ideas and checkmark accomplished ideas
Production
Although there were 2 designers in the group, we both of course had to do something. So while the other designer focused on helping with programming the game, I was asked to do the sound design for the game since they've heard that I did the sound design for my last Game Jam. This team I would say felt more organized as everyone was able to check in on everyone's work. Us designer's didn't have to constantly check what the artists were doing, and the artists mainly reported to each other, and asked or even told the programmers that certain assets should be or could be implemented.
Because I was mainly did Sound Design, I didn't constantly update with the others as I didn't want to distract them from their drawing and coding.
For this Game Jam also, I decided to challenge myself to create my own sounds. Now I didn't have any professional equipment with me, and all I had was my phone to record the sound, and a free audio editing software that was a bit difficult to use. But overall, it was a very fun experience as I had to creatively think of ways to find objects that can make unique sounds, and then edit the tune or pitch or other audio related fields to make them sound right for the game. It was especially important with the plane audio sound.
Most of the audio in the game were all self-recorded either by objects or by voice. The only audio that I got online were ambience sound, and music as I hadn't had enough time to record those, nor did I know how.
Unfortunately, I ran into an issue with my menu button clicking sound as the exported audio sounded very differently from the audio editing software, so I also had to quickly fetch one from the internet.
All audio gathered from online are copyright-free and are under creative common use.
I would say this Game Jam to be a success, and infinitely better than my first Game Jam. While making audio, I accidently learnt to make sound for potential action-like games that I would probably use in the future. Although unlikely to win this competition, it was a learning experience to see how others did theirs and I could learn a thing or 2 from other games.
Game Screenshot
