Fruits of my gamejam labour

[p3lb0x]

At the behest of Mouser I am gonna post the results of a small local gamejam I joined by the Organization Coding Pirates here in Denmark.

Coding Pirates are a volunteer organization that does community work with kids and young adults to get them interested in technology, programming and mixing these with more artistic endeavors (Like game making or visual arts). I hadn't actually heard of them before, but I saw the event through facebook and decided to join in.

The theme of the gamejam was mirrored from what they had helped the kids in their program work on for the last half year, but we were only afforded 12 hours (actually only 11 hours since the last hour was for a presentation). That theme being "feelings", completely open to interpretation.

The group I was in decided on "The feeling of confusion" as our interpretation, resulting in a maze game that tried to confuse the player through the use of rotating the playing field and teleporters. The game was made in Unity, something I've been dabbling in recently and hopefully can produce a small game in for my NANY. Lots of corners were cut, due to a mixture of us not being the most proficient at Unity, the other programmer in the group never having written any C# and time constraints. We did however produce a fully functional game with well defined gameplay elements and no bugs (as far as I know anyway).

Fruits of my gamejam labour

The goal of Squared? (Stylized as "?²") we made is to find 4 keys and reach the treasure behind the locked door.

Fruits of my gamejam labour

Gameplay is really simple, you walk around the maze with limited vision, only being able to see neighboring rooms. Compass rooms reorient the gameworld and teleporters move you to another place in the maze, there's also glyph rooms that help you create a mental map (that the rotations hopefully messes with).

We ended up being tied for last place however, because the game wasn't eye catching compared to the other games (that you can also download here)

[Deozaan]

Interesting game. I found it really easy to find 3 keys and the locked treasure while wandering kind of aimlessly, without having to think very hard about the map layout. But then it took me forever to find the 4th key and I had to create a mental map of it all. The colored glyphs were really helpful in helping me realize where I was in relation to everything else, especially after teleporting to somewhere new.

I know time is limited in game jams, so there wasn't much room for polishing things, but an option to restart or quit the game would have been nice. I was playing in fullscreen mode and had to press alt-f4 to close it after I got stuck on the "win screen."

The music was enjoyable. The sound effects were kind of hit & miss. The graphics were passable. I liked the way the feet animated, and how they even turned to face a wall if you pressed toward a direction you couldn't travel in.

Thanks for sharing.

[p3lb0x]

Ah, right. Should probably have mentioned the inability to actually quit the game.