Oh no, Poseidon’s precious pearl has been stolen! The king of Atlantis calls on you, his bravest water spirit, to take on the water cycle and retrieve it for him. Are you up to the task?

This is a 2D platformer I made with Andrew Scheafer for the Pixel Game Jam 2024. It was a runner-up in the Beginner’s Best category. The concept, assets, animations, and everything else was made from scratch in 10 days. You can download it or see the official itch.io page here.

Character Design Considering the time constraints and our skill levels for this project, I wanted to keep the character design as simple but iconic as possible within the requirements for the game. With the theme of the game jam being "aqua", we wanted our game to explore the different stages of the water cycle, and take our player on some sort of quest.

In the end, we decided to go with a platformer with the back story that the main character is a "water spirit," questing on behalf of Poseidon to find his beloved pearl and bring it back to Atlantis. This would give us the freedom to make a bunch of different versions of the main character as they go through all the cycle stages -- water, cloud, snow, etc. -- with the flexibility of adding or omitting levels depending on how much we could get done in the 10 days.

While we didn't get to include all of the different character iterations I had dreamed up, it was a great exercise in character creation. I learned how to work in a new medium (is pixel art a medium?) and challenged myself to create iterations that were distinguishable on their own (water vs cloud) but also could be easily idenitfied as the same character. The pixel art for this game was ranked 5 stars by the judges.

Animation

In addition to creating the characters, I also had the opportunity to animate them. In addition to the typical jumping/walking cycles, I also created some transitional animations to transport the character from one stage of the water cycle to the next. I used Procreate for this part of the process.

Fall sequence	Water Evaporation	Cloud formation	Precipitation

Animating pixel art is harder than it looks! I like to think I have done my fair share of walking cycles and more classic animation sequences, but when you’re working with such a small amount of real estate, every pixel counts. Through this process, I learned a lot about the 2D animation workflow and how to animate with more speed and efficiency. Once I got the hang of it, I could animate these little guys for hours.

All the levels that we didn't have time to create (snowfall, river ecosystem, etc.) for the submitted game were turned into a quick cutscene, which shows up at the beginning of the gameplay.

In theory, these levels would have explored other 2D gameplay genres, and the platforming level would have been only one piece of the adventure. But all of our big ideas for this project didn’t fit the strict timeline we were under (classic game jam dilemma), so we had to compromise. We hope to explore this idea further in the future, though.

Other

I was also responsible for developing other parts of the game, such as:

• Music and Sound Design (awarded 5 stars by the judges and ranked in the top 6% of all games submitted)
• UI design
• Dialogue system

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Looking back at this project, there are many things that we would have done differently or spent more time polishing up. But, considering it’s our first game and we only spent 10 days on it, I’m proud of how much we learned during this process and I’m excited to apply it to our next game :)

The actual game components were done in Unreal Engine 5.4.