Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Flight From Podunk Station
Earlier this week, we announced the winners of the 6th annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! Now, as in years past, for the next few Saturdays we'll be featuring spotlight posts taking a closer look at each of the winning games (in no particular order). Today, we're kicking things off with the Best Visuals winner, Flight from Podunk Station by onamint.
Based on Steamboat Willie, this year's big entrant into the public domain, Flight from Podunk Station is a short RPG that puts a dark twist on Mickey Mouse and his pals, casting them as gangsters on a midnight run aboard their boat. Of all the entries in the jams so far, this probably has the most original artwork we've ever seen. Right off the bat, you're introduced to the main cast of characters, each sporting a beautifully drawn portrait.
And as you can see, it's not just the portraits: the background and the text and the whole interface looks fantastic, immediately coming together to set the tone of the game, helped out by the simple and striking color scheme of greyscale art with red accents. Pretty soon, you'll be having violent encounters on the river, and getting introduced to a variety of wonderfully twisted enemy designs:
The mechanics of the game are straightforward, consisting of a little bit of resource management and plenty of classic turn-based combat. By the designer's own admission, the gameplay needs more refinement and balance, but that was a worthwhile sacrifice on the game jam timeline since it let so much love go towards the artwork. In a comment on Itch, the designer explains a bit more about the process for the artwork: the characters were all drawn from scratch then gussied up by digitally applying some paper textures, while the background uses a heavily-modified photo, and the interface combines original elements with a few modified third-party icons. The result of this combination is a huge success, and goes to show how smart use of various assets is almost as important as artistic ability when trying to make a good-looking game as a solo developer. Just one look at almost any screen from the game (and there are plenty more that you should go play to see for yourself) makes it obvious why Flight from Podunk Station is this year's winner for Best Visuals.
Congratulations Onamint for the win! You can play Flight from Podunk Station in your browser on Itch, plus don't forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn't quite make the cut! We'll be back next week with another winner spotlight.