For the month of September, I needed to take part in a game jam, but initially, I wasn’t sure which one. I looked through all the jams listed on indiegamejams.com and while you are spoilt for choice, not many were catching my eye. That was until one of my friends from the Birmingham Indie Developers, Kirsty Fraser, mentioned a game jam she was organising.

RainbowJam is a two-week games jam about exploring LGBT+ themes, running for its third year it’s partnered with the non-profit organization Queerly Represents Me and encourages representation and to “create games exploring and celebrating identity, gender, sexuality, sex, life, and love!” After working on Re(re4ti0n, I’ve felt a little urge to create some more experimental games that go against what I generally like, which would be arcade retro shooters/platformers with a neon glow or a retro aesthetic. I also knew I had some 3D functionality in Vigilante that deserve to be worked on enough for a complete game, so I spent a few weeks earlier in September to create a basic 3D game system.

Unfortunately, my 3D stuff was limited to what you can render. I consider Vigilante a 2D game framework with 3D elements, so I didn’t bother implementing 3D collision detection, but I had an idea: what if I make the game function in 2D space, but display in 3D space.

Gonna use some of this weekend for some prep-work for this month's game jam. Hopefully if all goes well, my submission will look nothing like this.#screenshotsaturday #sfml #indiedev #RainbowJam18 pic.twitter.com/O5zRN2hQWh — Gamepopper (@gamepopper) September 15, 2018

What I did was set up a small 2D enviroment with a tilemap and a basic sprite, and I set up the 3D models to display the scene based on the tilemap while the camera’s position and rotation is based on the sprite’s position and angle.

As you can see, I got the tilemape to display really well, the floor being a multi-segmented plane that could display mutliple different tiles in one model, and the walls being cubes that are scaled depending on where their neighbours are. Initially I was creating each cube as a separate model, which I felt was dangerously innefficient so I created a batch rendering group, creating one model but using multiple V3DObject instances to specifiy where that model should be rendered. I did need other things in the game though, stuff that the player can interact with, so I created a special model that could render a 2D sprite (including 2D animated sprites!) in a 3D enviroment, always facing the camera.

The last major thing I wanted was to add an additional level, as wondering a single room is good but extremely limited. As such I made a second tilemap, a model to represent a ramp of sorts and added variables and additional groups to tell what floor the player is on, and as such what should be displayed/collided with. The bigger challenge was implementing how the player will climb up stairs, as it also had to factor falling. Combining gravity with the player moving upwards if the sprite is overlapping the area where the said slope is situated took a lot of trial and error before I finally got a dituation where the player could fully explore the floor above and walk back down to the ground floor!

After making the slope look a bit more like steps, the demo was pretty much ready for RainbowJam.

It is possible for the 3D camera to move in all directions, although I think for some games it's probably not worth it. #IndieDevHour #SFML #OpenGL #IndieDev #GameDev pic.twitter.com/Cwjrb2b6yJ — Gamepopper (@gamepopper) September 19, 2018

To make a game for Rainbow Jam, I wanted to make a game that is about sharing love and making people happy. I went with a game about being a fursuiter because as a furry, I know the community is very supportive of LGBTQ+ people and as someone who’s performed in fursuits at conventions and meets, I feel the most important aspect is to make anyone you see feel happy, entertained and loved, even if it’s by portraying a character.

Making the attendees you interact with was probably the biggest challenge, I made a dough body sprite with frames for actions at each angle, and made the object switch frames based on what angle it’s facing from the player. As for the AI I considered setting up a finate-state machine, but fearing it would be too much work for a jam I went for a simple state model. I got my code for line of sight and path finding from previous projects in order to get the attendees to walk around the floors they are on, wave at the player when they see them and either hug or prepare a camera for a photo, responding to what the player does at the same time.

To simulate the limited vision of fursuits was to overlay the screen with a mask. I added a little bobbing while walking for fun, as seen in the tweet below, however a fellow gamedev suggested getting the camera to bob in time as well, which ended up working pretty effectively!

So I know some of you really like the 3D stuff, but the game makes more sense if I partially obscured it. Sorry. #RainbowJam #SFML #GameDev pic.twitter.com/gGHFun6xvW — Gamepopper (@gamepopper) September 30, 2018

All the graphics and audio was done on the last day, I used the dough sprite as a base while I apply the colour and details over it. I unfortunately realised the limitation I set myself using a 20×20 tile size, but I think there is enough space to see who is who. As for the enviroments I used some references for hotels, such as the carpet and ceilings. There is a chandelier on the ground floor, which I designed myself to be multiple 2D images rotated because I found most 3D models online to be needlessly complex.

Main graphics added, and some sounds too. The walls need stuff added to make them look nice. #RainbowJam #SFML #GameDev pic.twitter.com/6DTNos8uHm — Gamepopper (@gamepopper) September 30, 2018

At around 11pm on Sunday, I uploaded Fursuit Run to Itch.io making this the game for September. There is still a voting period which begins when the jam officially ends on the 6th October. So far the reception has been fairly positive, mostly from furries, some non-furries don’t appear to like the idea without actually playing the game as of writing. I’m pretty happy with how the game turned out, as well as the 3D system. There is definitely room for improvement, as there isn’t much optimization that could be done such as view frustum culling. I’m hoping to get it improve for my next games jam, 7DFPS.