Game Jam: Mamapato

Aalto’s Devlog #2 / 28th August - 1st September 2023

A humorous duckling idea triggered our work on concepts and mockups.
Creating laid-back, fun animations to achieve a crazy crowd effect.
Developing visual elements of the game to follow the style of our funky animations and colourful illustrations.
Despite the missing details in our game, we achieved our objective: creating a fun simple game. It was now time to see if our colleagues enjoyed it. You can test it too!

Join the ducklings party!

Theme: Follower

For our 5-day Game Jam, we faced the challenging task of developing a game that fit the theme "Follower". With a tight timeframe, we knew that careful scoping was key to creating a functional prototype. Our approach to this project was to make a fun, simple mobile rhythm game where you and a bunch of ducklings are chasing after the coolest duck around, the Queen of Ducks. The goal is to find your way through three stages packed with obstacles and points to score – but remember to move to the rhythm to get the highest score!

Nina Tepponen, Kati Salminen, Shamit Ahmed, Hanzhi Zhang, Antti Kangas, John Emslie, Néstor Feijoo Melián

Team

In the first hours of the Game Jam, we brainstormed ideas around the theme "Follower", utilizing our team's varied experiences. We unanimously decided to create a simple, vibrant mobile rhythm game. Our sound designer's expertise inspired us to base the game on "following your rhythm", leading to an avalanche of creative ideas. Ideas like fans pursuing a rock star, or a parade of ducklings following a famous duck, sparked our interest. This humorous duckling idea triggered immediate work on concepts and mockups.

First Drafts

Early brainstorm session - Follower

Rough sketches and visual ideas - Ducklings

Concept art - Illustration by Hanzhi Zhang

Game sketches - Illustration by Hanzhi Zhang

Mobile mockups - Mamapato

Animation

We wanted the animation to reflect the game's fun, casual concept. The horde of ducklings—animated from a chubby bouncing ball—was our first creation. We added limited details and, through repetition and offset, easily achieved the desired crazy-crowd effect. This key element set the tone for the rest of our laid-back, fun animations.

Graphics & UI

The visual elements of the game follow the style of our funky animations and the colourful illustrations created for this project. Our game’s name ‘Mamapato’ (‘Mother Duck’ in Spanish) came naturally during the process and we adapted it in the logo to the languages of our team members (Finnish, Bengali, Chinese). Every element, from the typography to the UI, follows this idea of ‘bounciness’ and simplicity. Also, as it is meant to be a mobile game, the interface is simple and the colour palette is very limited in order to achieve great impact even on small screens.

Level 01

Shield effect and particles

Game Over

Top Menu in different stages

Sucess UI elements

Fail UI elements

Button and text elements

On Day 5, our Jam ended in the afternoon. Despite the missing details in our game (sprites generating on the wrong side, faulty colliders, missing buttons, etc.) we had achieved our objective of creating a fun simple game. We only had the testing left to see if the game was good enough and if our colleagues liked it. In the testing, people enjoyed the artwork and the quirky music enhanced the arcade-like atmosphere when we set up three computers for players to test it. It was so much fun - testers had a good time during the gameplay and they were competing for first place on the leaderboard!

You can try it too in the link below.