NsFB: Not Safe For Bugs 

I worked with Evie Smith on NSFB: Not Safe for Bugs for Ludum Dare 45 — The theme was “Start With Nothing“.
This was a 48-hour Jam, with a few updates a few weeks after the jam for an in-person demo.
Music by CaseJackal.

Links:
Play NSFB: Not Safe For Bugs on itch.io

Art Approach

This was my first jam after starting my new job at Subliminal working on Button City, which is flat shaded and uses one world texture to map colors onto all of the models, a technique that makes it easy to build out many assets quickly. This was also my first jam using Blender instead of Maya. I challenged myself to use new workflows and see how much “finished” art I could churn out by the end. I was able to concept, model, rig and animate 3 characters, 6 environment props, several tile variants and some basic UI during the jam — the rocket in the title screen and some of the more refined UI screens came later.

  1. Strict color palette, assigned Day 1 (this way Emerson could color-pick in her version in-engine for things like UI and perfectly match the art, and everything would always look unified)

  2. Made the game Unlit (not having to worry about lighting saves sooooo much time — all the art I worked on looked 1:1 in my modeling software and in-game)

  3. Texture Atlasing (using one texture that was simply a grid with colors freed me from doing “good” UVs, and let me quickly build out final art while modeling without switching programs to UV and paint)

  4. Pared down animations to only what we absolutely needed to make the game feel polished (no fussy walk animations — we took advantage of the tile-based, toy-like look of the game to simplify movement)

Daily Breakdown

This is how my workdays broke down for this jam. This is only what I did, not what Evie did! Below that are some process images.

Day 1 (Friday night):

  1. Brainstorming with Evie

  2. Sketched Characters + Environment Concepts

  3. Assigned Color Palette

  4. Modeled Protaganist

Day 2 (All Day Saturday):

  1. Modeled Enemy Lizard 1

  2. Modeled tiles and environment props

  3. Rigged and animated main character

Day 3 (Sunday before 6pm):

  1. Rigged and animated enemy lizard 1

  2. Modeled, rigged and animated enemy lizard 2

  3. Polished and set-dressed game scene