As many games do, our game started with a Game Jam. On Friday, February 9, 2018, having recently passed up the opportunity to participate in Global Game Jam, our team divined our own jam in the solitude of my apartment living room and embarked on an assuredly doomed mission to make a game in 48 hours.
Feasting on fried chicken (the fuel of champions), we debated words we had randomly generated from the internet, which were to be our guiding themes for the jam. “Turn,” “Boredom,” and “Drunk Driving.” Color us unimpressed. We quickly ruled out racing games, and decided to focus solely on the word Drunk, because hey it’s our jam and we can drink if we want to.
Flash forward a few hours, and we had done little more than argue about ideas (and drink). As a general rule, we said that we didn’t want to go to sleep that night until we had a solid direction and something playable. By 1 or 2 am, we had managed to get a vampire character to move on screen in a top-down 2D view.
And despite many real world distractions, we ploughed through our work (with a janky Scrum board to boot) and had a fully playable demo by Sunday evening. The true testament to how much we enjoyed the jam is that immediately after finishing work on Sunday, we celebrated the birthday of one of the members of the team, and he spent the whole time talking about when we could go back and work on the game more.
As many games don’t, our game made it past a 48-hour Game Jam. This blog will chronicle that journey.
-Carlos