For this years Game Jam with the topic Mean Maschine, we (members listed at the end) as team “👾” decided to once again create an Unreal Engine game and even surpass the standards we set to ourselves last year.
After a small brainstorming session we decided to go with the following idea:
Postlair is a game about delivering packages to the right houses. You control the BesAir delivery truck and have to shoot a package into the marked properties. As soon as you have delivered all packages, you must return to the post office to complete the day. In the office, you may buy upgrades with coins you can collect along the way. Each day, your remaining time will be converted into your score and added to your total score. Each day will get harder until you run out of time, at which point you will see your final score.
Official description
Creating the intro
In the last few minutes before the event ended, I had the idea of creating an intro and animating the logo – something that most likely would also seperate us from the other contestants. This wouldn’t have been possible when we wouldn’t have sticked to a clean pipeline approach – such as Jascha working with Illustrator Layers – which REALLY cut time when I started animating the wings! Even though it might not be polished, I think it kinda fits the spirit of our team xD
Creating the soundtrack
Just like last year, I was responsible for creating the soundtrack and helping Wolfgang with the Sound Effects. At some point during the event, I noticed that whatever I did, I tended to not write music for the game but rather creating something totally different or let’s say rather more hyping instead of the goofy style the game needed. However, having not the time to finetune the music, I decided to keep the first version of the soundtrack as Main menu:
At this point, I started working on a second, more vivid piece that should resemble the lack of time during the gameplay and should motivate the player in achieving the goal. This resorted into my favourite piece I did during the event but clearly, this still didn’t resemble the style we needed which meant, unfortunately, that we couldn’t implement it.
After some small tweaks in the arrangment, I managed to strip down the hyping part into a small piano piece and even though I really feel sad that it lost most of its charme, it now fits perfectly into the jumping and wiggling of the truck.
Conclusion
Even though it kind of feels like we had more fun the year before, we managed to achieve higher quality and created a gameworld that lies full of potential. But all an all, maybe the part regarding fun just can be led to the fact that this is the third Jam in about a month and Christmas was coming close – who knows?
Download
Thomas even mentioned to publish it to Steam once he finished fixing some bugs – I’ll post the link as soon that happens. Up until this point, you can download the game from:
Team
- Dario Ackermann (3D Modelling)
- Axel Bauer
- Thomas Förg (Game Programming)
- Jascha Hanisch (3D Modelling, UI)
- Wolfgang Schwendtbauer (Level design, Sound Effects)