Global Game Jam 2019: Happy Lucky Chopsticks

Happy Lucky Chopsticks

In January, I participated in Global Game Jam (GGJ 2019) with my friends in Ottawa. The theme for 2019 was "Home". Over the course of a weekend (very stressful and time limiting), we developed a casual competitive multiplayer video game. We came up with the idea of having players compete to grab dim sum from a constantly spinning turntable at a Chinese restaurant with their chopsticks.

Our game, Happy Lucky Chopsticks, was simple and only had 2 controls and a maximum of 4 players:

1. Grab the food
2. Spin the turntable and make all the food fly away and get a new batch (or prevent others from getting their orders!)

The game also strives to overcome language barriers by using pictures rather than words to explain gameplay. Our game was developed in Unity (C#) and runs in the MS Windows platform.

I was a 3D modeler for this project and created many assets for this game such as various dumplings and buns using Autodesk Maya. The objects were a challenge to model due to the folds in the food and limiting the polycount to optimize rendering. The UV mapping however proved to be relatively easy as I started from cubes and texturing involved understanding the natural seams and knowing how the UVs would be displayed. I also created some UI graphics as well as staged and rendered a dining table set as a start screen.

Due to time limitations, we were not able to render as high quality as we would have liked (i.e. the table is not very round, some geometry are not smoothed, the shadows are not rendered at high resolution). We would also have liked to create better textures for our 3D assets such as using normal maps and alpha channels. For our hard work, we achieved 3rd place for Jammer's Choice.

My team's project can be found at: https://globalgamejam.org/2019/games/happy-lucky-chopsticks