The Bee's Knees was a project created by Elliot Wenzel (animation, tech anim), Dotun Oseni-Adegbite (programmer), and me (art) for the Global Game Jam 2024. This was mine and Elliot's first ever game jam and we are so happy with the result. This year, GGJ allowed teams to work for up to a week and be remote. We worked on this game every day for about 4ish hours after work and came up with something fairly polished.

The GGJ theme: Make Me Laugh

To start the jam we came up with a few game ideas on our own then shared what we had. This was a good process for us because it allowed us to come up with something unique without being influenced or pressured by each other. We had a few great ideas and several ideas overlapped. We chose our best and started to flesh out what each would look like. As we talked I drew rough key art of what our game would look like. We talked in detail about 3 ideas, a Monkey Ball like game, a Splatoon-like ice cream shooter and an Animal Crossing-like comedy club. In the end we really connected with the comedy club. We settled on using Unreal Engine 5.

Later that night I sketched what our main character would look like and a few moves she might do.

We held a meeting each night where we set up our goals for the next night. Example:

1. create our own test scenes 
2. Elliot rig bee 
3. Dotun - figure out how to tag where we can get beats in the song, start UI functions

While the bee was being rigged I got to work on creating those iconic Animal Crossing like expressions and blocking out the environment. I created this by making a visor of geo that matched the face and applied the textures.

My main vision for the environment was mostly "the feeling of a comedy club but for bees". The things that stuck out to me in comedy clubs were candles, red brick, velvet, dark wood, low light, a stage, and that microphone, stool combo. To really drive home the bee theme we settled on a hexagon motif. 

The next day I focused more on the environment. I used Marvelous Designer for the table cloth and curtains. I modeled some very quick hexagonal furniture in Maya and placed a few lights in engine. I also started to play with the post processing volume and camera and created the velvet texture using Unreal's shader graph to save time.

By this time Dotun started to get the basic song selection UI up and running and the rig was finished. We had some functionality by day 5!

I also finished up the textures of the club.

By Saturday night we had the bee in the project and she had some animations. Now, I needed to texture the bee and work on all VFX, UI, and other 2D elements. Dotun played a major part in hooking up the UI so I could add the art easily.

Elliot created 8 animations total and created the state machines for the main bee and the audience bees. He and I also developed a system to switch the material on the face based on your success or failure to hit the notes or beat the song.

I started to make the VFX and system to spawn when you missed or got a perfect hit on the notes.

We had a working game now and all we needed to do was add 2 more songs and polish.

Elliot was our main sound designer and was in change of making the music gameplay system since he was the only one on the team that had a history with musical instruments and dance. He placed each note by hand into a sequencer for 2 out of the 3 songs. These keys would trigger when a note needed to show up. It was difficult getting the timing right due to the spawn delay in our system but he figured it out.

Then it was the final day. We pretty much had everything finished. I built the game and filled out our submission form and published to itch.io.

Our team was amazing and we really pulled through. I could not have imagined we would get a game as polished as this out of a game jam. I wouldn't have been able to pull this off without my teammates, Dotun and Elliot. 

 Play it here! or watch the trailer below.

Thanks for reading!

A few extra pieces of UI art I'd like to show.