Sheridan Design Week is a week long game jam that is run once every semester, with various themes each time. Game design students across years 1-3 are grouped together to foster teamwork skills and to mentor new designers. For spring 2020, we were tasked with making a classic arcade game playable on Sheridan's own arcade cabinets. My team of seven drew inspiration from games like Space Invaders and other classic arcade shooters, but we didn't want to make a game that had shooting as a main mechanic. We also wanted to take advantage of the twin joysticks the arcade cabinets had and make a coop game. Thus we came up with the idea of separately controllable mech arms. We also took a look at Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, which had players piloting a player character that in turn piloted a larger machine, and decided we wanted to try something similar.
As the only art focused member on the team, I created all the main assets: the bug enemy sprites and the mech itself, along with player icons. I used Aseprite for all my work. This was my first time working in an art pipeline (despite the pipeline consisting of just me, technically), and it opened my eyes to the intricacies of tracking assets and my work progress. Since this was before our first year programming class had taught version control in-depth, I was also able to learn a little about Git through the upper years on my team.