An arcade platformer made during the Global Game Jam 2013. In the game you have to do dangerous things like jumping over rooftops in order to keep your adrenaline levels up for as long as possible.
It was the first game jam I participated in. I took the train to the HKU jam site in Hilversum together with a friend. The theme of the jam was:
🔊 The Sound of a Heartbeat ♥
Going in blind we had no idea what to expect. We were both capable of coding but not knowing what other skills would be there, we chose to put ‘Designer’ on our badges and we formed a team with two programmers.
The theme made me think of the movie ‘Crank‘, in which the main character must keep his adrenaline flowing to prevent him from dying. And so, the game concept was decided in the first half hour.
During the jam, I:
- Designed the main gameplay and random generation
- Made the UI; sprites and code
- Coded additional mechanics and aesthethics
My main takeaways from my first game jam were:
- Take the time working out the concept! Half an hour is definitely too quick
- You’re never as bad as you think you are
- It’s often clearer for the player to use discrete states instead of a continuous one. I tied the player’s walking speed directly to health instead of switching between ‘healthy’ and ‘low health’ walking speeds. This got frustrating fast. Especially since close-to-zero health meant close-to-zero speed.
