How we did not attend at Global Game Jam 2018

Jammers have put down their keyboards, pens and paper. They have stopped eating pizza. Even the organizers have had a chance to get some sleep. This means that Global Game Jam® 2018 has come to an end, and what a weekend it was!” – States the official site(https://globalgamejam.org/news/our-final-transmission-ggj18) of Global Game Jam.

During the 3 days of the jam 42,800 people participated, spread across 108 countries. Pocket Games members naturally were also involved. We ended up being late completing the game. So eventually we did not upload it to the official globalgamejam.org site. However we did make a game, even though a bit late, but it is still a game. It’s called Hey Taxi.

Basically your job is to manage and run a taxi company. You need to set the routes for the taxis to the customers, manage your ratings and purchase new taxis as the cash flows in. The time is very important here, as the customers are no the patient kind. The quicker you get someone to their desired destination, the better rating you get. Once you lose all your stars(rating) you lose the game too, its simple right?

Turns out not so much, as it is pretty hard to control more than 2-3 taxis at the same time. The largest issue we have in the game is taxis being behind buildings where you cannot control them. Also, drawing the path for the cars is sometimes junky and is not as polished as it should be.

The first day was a Friday, after work we headed over to the local Global Game Jam site, which was located at Nemesys Games to watch the keynote, and learn about the theme of the jam. The Keynote was very strange at best… It was kind of creepy and we did not really know what to make of it. Check it out yourself here(https://youtu.be/3Roxls_2W2M).

After the keynote, we headed back to our office to start planning and designing the game. We did the usual brainstorming round and we came up with about 9 ideas. Ranging from an angry birds type game, but only with satellites to a pigeon flying game where you play as the pigeon and have to deliver(transmit) the data, something like Avian Carrier(Wikipedia). 

Eventually we voted and stuck with a taxi company manager idea. This was followed by pitching ideas and features to make it to the game. Just after a couple of hours, we had a game idea, a core and a nice to have feature list. The repository was made for the coders that night. Just after that we called it a day and went to rest, as we knew, the next two days we won’t get much chance to sleep.

Saturday morning (okay not really, more like 11am) we are back in the office and everyone started to work on a part of the game. At the end of the first day, we had a ton of work done. Some of us went home to rest, but the hardcore coders and artists stayed all night to continue working. When they passed out, they fortunately did it on one of the couches or on one of the bean bags, and not on their keyboards.

Sunday was spent with finishing up the game, we wanted to make everything work just fine. So we ran out of time, but the game was done around 11pm. Check out Hey Taxi here: https://goo.gl/Vd6nQr

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Thanks everyone for participating, I hope we'll manage our time better next time..

Originally posted at pocketgames.eu/news!