Creating Amo In A Week news - Amo

45 Degrees. That was the prompt my professor gave me and two classmates for a week-long GameJam project. We limited ourselves to one week of development, Sunday-to-Sunday. In exactly one week, we took our little concept and actually concocted a playable, interactive experience. We spent roughly 10 hours a day working on this project, so in a combined effort, that's about 210 hours between the three of us. We started out brainstorming what '45 degrees meant', whether it was temperature or angles..We decided on a strong triangular aesthetic that reinforced the idea of sharp angles. For a week's worth of work, we think Amo turned out to be an eye-opening learning experience, as well as an interesting, even if rough, finished product. We hope you enjoy playing our game as much as we did making it!

Interestingly enough, even though we had such a short amount of time for development, we still wanted to include a strong narrative, even if it was simple. I worked with my fellow classmates to develop a story in which Amo, our hero, is guided by Nyx, the Goddess of Sleep, on his adventure to become the hero he admires. Nyx helps Amo by placing triangles in his path to help him overcome obstacles. We set up special 'hero' locations that included a shop, a giant tree, and a shrine, where he obtained the armour he needs in order to become that hero. We also didn't want the game to include violence, so if Amo fails in his quest, he gets another try.

My own personal involvement on the project included a lot of the art direction. On day one I sat down and drew up some concept art for the character, the mood, the settings, etc. After that, the rest of the development days became a blur of modeling, animating, and applying materials. We spent about 6 days on content creation. The last day was when everything took most of it's shape, as I spent a good couple hours set dressing the level and bringing Amo's little world to life.

I could go on and on about how much we learned from this project, which was a ton. I could also talk about all the problems we experienced and how if we had had more time, this and that could have been fixed/added. But I'm truly happy we spent our school break building something unique, hopefully fun, engaging, and artistically driven with great friends who we've gotten much closer to over the last couple of days. We'd love if it you could try the game out, leave some feedback on all of our hard work!