A friend and I (Badgerspitstudios) recently entered the GDevelop Game jam 5. We had a week to make a game based around the theme 'Unstable’ and so created 'Battle Bear Bumper Bash', where 4 Bears battle it out on unstable ice. Im pleased to announce that we came 7th on the community voted leader board. It was a lot of fun creating the characters and environment for this game and it provided me with experience working to a deadline and having to iterate designs quickly and prioritize work flows. I’m proud of what we created and you can play it for yourself for free using the link: https://badgers-pit.itch.io/battle-bear-bumper-bash

Initial Tests

Initially we wanted to create an Ice Hockey party game, inspired by the classic game modes in Crash Bash or Mario Party, with the Puck becoming gradually more unstable to match the theme. After generating some initial concepts on Midjourney we liked the idea of a floating island and took this forward for the finished product. We ultimately decided to change the concept for the game to bumper cars on unstable ice as this suited the theme more than our initial concept.

Character design workflow

We were quite ambitious opting for a 3D multiplayer game for a primarily 2D engine. I needed to iterate quickly and make sure the texturing workflow allowed for quick design changes and customizability. I started by blocking out a basic bumper car and a previously made goose model, for test purposes. What was immediately apparent was the character designs needed to be big and blocky. I then finalised the bumper car model to be used in the final product plus a box model for a character (at this point we were unsure whether to go for gorillas or bears)

After testing was complete and character movement was finalised, I sculpted a bear in Zbrush and quickly retopologized the character. This allowed me to mirror the Uv’s to create a faster texturing workflow. This also applied to the UV’s of the bumper cars

Environment

I initially created a blockout of broken ice, on our previous map, that included Ice walls that would break on player collision and create opportunities for players to bump other players off the map. My teammate (coding the game) found that the AI struggled with the concave iceberg shapes; so on further iterations I made the Icebergs rounder which helped with AI map collisions. We chose to not include the ice walls due to time constraints but I actually think that the final composition works better without them.