Hey there! I’m Rina from Team Supersonic Crab and we’ve recently submitted a silly little strategy game called “Mimicry Mayhem: Octofriend’s Odyssey” for the AI and Games Jam 2023. We’ve spent the last week conceptualizing, planning, designing, programming, modeling, implementing, bug-fixing, and eventually scrambling to the finish line with minutes to spare. We’re all pretty exhausted to say the least. Though the exhaustion wasn’t in vain because we are very proud of what we’ve created.

If you’ve come across this postmortem and haven’t already taken a look at the game, “Mimicry Mayhem: Octofriend’s Odyssey” or just “Mimicry Mayhem” for short is a turn based strategy game about a mimic octopus battling their way through an enemy infested lava flooded jungle. It’s a goofy premise, yes, but the gameplay can get rather difficult with a core mechanic of the game being that when you defeat an enemy and gain their ability it comes with a movement reduction that could make or break your run. There are 16 different enemies with unique attacks that you can copy as well as unique patterns they take out of your movement opportunities. The way you move around the play area is dictated by a compass around the player which has quadrants that will disappear when you copy an ability; in the game you pick up orbs dropped by defeated enemies which can be dropped to regain movement. The abilities you can pick up range from pushing, pulling, short-range, and long-range attacks. We were quite happy that we got all the enemies we planned to implement into the game, given that 16 unique enemies is a lot for a game jam. I find the number works great with the way I’ve designed the UI; the octopus exists as a HUD element in the game representing the health and physically holds the orbs it’s collected maxing out the held abilities to 8.

As the de-facto UI artist in the group I have a lot to consider when I design elements that exist in the game. I try to make sure my designs are simple and realistic to implement in the span of a jam so our UI programmer (Eric aka DevErox) can get the UI functioning as soon as possible. This time around it took a bit to hone in on our idea so we sadly wasted a bit of time in terms of honing in on our UI design. Despite the wasted time we ended up with something very cute and related to the world of the game. I’m personally a fan of diegetic and skeuomorphic UI designs so that somewhat influences the way I go about my design process. After having a good look at all the images of my revisions during the “Mimicry Mayhem” I can definitely see I’ve gone for something akin to skeuomorphism this time around with the health bar and items being the octopus it represents. I also took the opportunity to make the title, win/loss, and end screen have a little story about Octofriend too since it’s fun to consider narrative within UI designs. The UI that exists in the jam build of the game is the minimum viable UI we needed to have a functional game, and I had many ideas that had to be axed to avoid scope creep. Hopefully I get an opportunity to revisit my ideas in the future in either another game or within a more polished build of “Mimicry Mayhem”.

This game jam was a great opportunity to practice working in Unreal Engine. I didn’t just design the UI. I also designed the tokens for the player character and enemies, learned how to use blueprints to make a tool that turns images into meshes (following a tutorial), created materials (also following a tutorial), decorated maps with foliage and props found on Quixel, and played around with the UI in engine myself (which I typically don’t do). This was my second jam with me contributing directly in Unreal rather than passing off files to get implemented. The more I work in Unreal the more I get familiar with the quirks that I hear a lot about from our amazing programmer Chris (Cjor100). It’s amazing just how much there is to learn with this engine, and realistically I probably won’t need to get too in-depth unless I want to do something super complicated. I’m primarily a 2D vector artist so finding a way to convert my files into 3D meshes was quite literally game changing. We initially were going to have the tokens as simple sprites before I came across that image to mesh blueprint tutorial I’ve mentioned earlier! Getting an opportunity to dip my toes in the 3D art space through creating displacement maps for the tokens was a happy accident for sure. Towards the last few hours I had some time to spare so I floated around the idea of doing our maps in a similar way rather than doing a map with the cube grid tool which we ended up shipping the game with. Overall, I’m personally very pleased with the designs I came up with (even if it can be a bit hard to see in game), along with the greater contributions I had which helped the rest of the team immensely.

Going forward we hope to finish this game and give it the polish it deserves! On my end I’ll take the time to really think about user experience with my UI, along with helping create a tutorial to introduce the controls. The state the game is in as of writing is already more polished than we expected it to be, although the feedback we’ve gotten already has got us thinking of ways to improve. We’re planning on implementing mechanics we initially planned but cut for time, making combat more clear to the player, and overall improving the experience and design of the game. I personally really want to revisit the maps and make them prettier!

If you’ve read this far, thank you for lending me your time! And if you’ve read this far and haven’t played our game, please give it a try and leave some feedback. It’ll be appreciated and we will be very very very thankful. It can be difficult to get people to go out of their way to download a jam game like ours. I’ve noticed that during ranked jams like this people may only try out the browser games! They’re usually pretty great but it can get frustrating watching other people get tons and tons of good feedback and reviews and recognition while we struggle to get people to even download and run the game. It’s a trend that I’ve personally observed in large game jams, so I go out of my way to play games that need to be downloaded like ours. I personally believe jam organizers should make a greater effort to get their participants to try out a larger variety of games rather than the quick/easy to play ones. There are so many great games that simply get overlooked as a result. I understand it might not be intuitive to some and Unreal file sizes can get big, but we do our best to make it easy for potential players! Typically for Unreal jam games all you need to do is download the provided zip, unzip it, and run the executable; and if you aren’t sure if it’s safe there should be other files in the folder that indicate that a real game exists. With that said, if you decide to try out “Mimicry Mayhem” I encourage you to also try out some other submitted downloadable games too!

If you have an questions or comments feel free to leave something on this post or on the main page and we’ll get back to you promptly!

Thanks again for reading,

-Rina, UI designer/artist for Team Supersonic Crab