Global Game Jam 2015

The Global Game Jam 2015 is over for another year and it’s genuinely been the most enjoyable jam we’ve attended yet.

With the office equipment boxed up and moved temporarily to Abertay University, and the core dev team stocked up on a range of healthy snacks and caffeinated beverages, the 48 hour game making marathon began.

The theme of this game jam: “What do we do now?”

This opened up a lot of possibilities and we set about on our normal brainstorming process, although in the end we decided to do something a little different…

Instead of taking the theme and trying to fit a game concept around it, we decided to literally apply the theme to the process of building the game.

Firstly, Brian quickly hacked together a random word generator, primed with a long list of words established during the usual brainstorming session. Every two hours it produced a word telling us what we do now, so that’s the jam theme covered in a nutshell!

Art and code then set about building something which related to the word, and spent some time putting it all together into a coherent whole.

During the 48 hours, the words we had to work with were Nature, Klein Bottle, Window, Mountains, Misery, Cookie, Camera, Camera, Blue, Survival, Lever. 

Admittedly, ‘nature’ was a good starting point, so we put together a lush environment, but after that it essentially it became a video game interpretation of dada…

We ended up with a random Klein Bottle…

A UniPig… The ability to ride a critter that’s a cross between a Unicorn and a Pig.

And a Mountain Launcher… Yes, a gun that shoots mountains!

And many others weird and wonderful things.

The reason this particular jam was so enjoyable was down to the process. Although we got a strange mash together of different objects and gameplay, the fact that every few hours there was a completely new problem to solve kept the team interested.

The game itself assumed the title ‘What have we done!’, and it’s something that could never really have been made if it’d been pre-planned in the normal way, even if we’d tried to go as crazy as possible with ideas.

It’s easily our most trippy experience to date, and with the Oculus it’s just a little insane…