Ben Hubner

Yolk

Yolk is an adventure platforming game about an egg-like creature that is trying to discover who and what they are. This game was created for Champlain College's Production II class during the Spring semester 2020. As such, not only is it the first 3D game that I created as part of a team, but it was also the first experience I had with collaborating with others remotely due to COVID-19. This game started off with just four people, including myself, creating the basic concept and mechanics from scratch; as the only programmer at that time, I created almost all the functionality, including the player's movement and abilities (like picking objects up). Halfway through the semester we were able to show off Yolk at a Greenlight presentation, where us and the other teams would be able to show our games and see if we could keep working on them for the rest of the semester. Our teachers were impressed with Yolk at that stage, so they allowed us to continue working and add some more people to our team. We were able to get another of each role on the team we had (another designer, programmer, artist, and producer), bringing the total number of people on the team up to eight.

After Greenlight, we were able to continue working and developing Yolk as a full game, instead of just a concept. We had a great deal of ideas for Yolk, including multiple levels, a crafting and inventory system, and more. Unfortunately, right in the middle of our working on expanding upon Yolk, the COVID-19 pandemic started, and our development was shifted drastically to an all-remote collaboration. As this was the first time any of us had experienced remote work in a professional capacity, and none of us were ready for a pandemic, production was much slower than anticipated. We continued our work on Yolk through the end of the semester, but as a team we were not satisfied with the final product yet. So, we decided to continue working over the summer to improve and polish what we had created so we could show more of our original vision of Yolk to others. We proceeded to work on Yolk through summer 2020, adding two additional members to the team for more hands on the project, and we released Yolk as a free to play demo in August of 2020.

With all the challenges we faced during our development of Yolk, both normal game development issues as well as COVID-19, I'm glad to say that we created a piece that I am proud of (and I believe the rest of the team is as well). If you would like to check out Yolk, you can find us on itch.io here. If you would like to find out more about Wild Village Games, our team that developed Yolk, click here!