2018 Global Game Jam

The global game jam is an event that takes place once a year where people build a game in 48 hours based on a theme. The theme for 2018 was transmission. I got together with a few friends, some people I recently met at the PIGSquad meetups and a few others I did not previously know but are also part of the PIGSQuad.

Friday night we gathered at the Art Institute in Portland OR who was offering up some of their space for the event. After the theme was announced we found a room and started discussing what kind of game we wanted to make. Because of the limited experience most team members, including myself, we wanted to make something simple and in 2d. Most ideas we came up with we had to throw out because we knew we wouldn't be able to get them done in the 48 hours we had.

We ultimitly decided to build a two-player puzzle platformer titled Psyforce. Player one was on the top half of the screen and the second player was on the button half. There would be buttons that will open and close gates to create puzzles. We added an electric bolt that chases one of the players to add tension because we knew we couldn't come up with complex puzzles in the short time frame.

By the end of the 48 hours we did manage to get the game done but it had a few major bugs. The player can clip into the moving gates and the winning game text was very hard to see against the game screen. We intended to have a dedicated scene or black background but couldnt get to it in time.

We had a number of features that we wanted to add but couldn't add in the timeframe. One was dedicated scenes for the win and lose states. We also wanted to add a how to play scene and design more complex levels. A game machinic we planed to add was the ability for only one player to jump and the other can punch. They would be able to change which role they had by hitting a button swapping their boots and gloves. This would allow for more complex puzzles. For the punching challenges we were going to add breakable boxes. We also discussed the possibility of adding in patrolling enemies.

While we didn't create the game, we envisioned in the 48 hours we did manage to get a working game. Considering most of us including myself had little experience in the ame development I feel it was a success and most importantly we all had a lot of fun.

Most of us are still adding small updates on occasion get it more polished and add in some of the features we didn't get to add. You can view the code on my GitHub.