During a winter break from school, one of my friends and I decided to join a small two day game jam for fun, and the prompt was “One Minute”. After a short brainstorm, we settled on the idea of playing as an apartment cleaner who had put off their work until the last minute and was forced to get all their work done before the owners got home. The main idea was to create a series of Cooking Mama-style minigames in the fashion of “simulator” games, with overly exaggerated physics and a first person camera. Our twist idea was that the player would be forced to clean up a crime scene in the final room, and be doing tasks a cleaner would otherwise not do.
I was the sole designer and programmer while my friend did all of the 3D and 2D artwork. The project went relatively smoothly, but I took on way more as the programmer than I expected, since I wasn’t necessarily working on a single mechanic, but several different gimmicks for all the different minigames. In addition, essentially all of these different minigames revolved around the mouse, and I was not very comfortable with mouse integration in Unreal to that degree at this point. I tend to like making projects that could theoretically be played on a simple controller.
Unfortunately the primary issue was once again over scoping, as we were hoping to put together at least a few rooms, and were barely able to manage two. I spent an unexpectedly long time with the “mop” minigame, as I could not easily figure out the quickest way to create what was essentially a paint program in reverse, especially when trying to consider making it remotely “accurate” but “fair” when it came to detecting how much of the floor was actually mopped.
Overall, I definitely enjoyed working on this, and I’m glad our concept forced me to step out of my comfort zone. I wish I had more time to explore the particulars that I wasn’t at all comfortable with, but I’m also glad I cast a semi-wide net with things to try out. You can give it a try HERE
This project was done for the global game jam and I was on a team with 11 people. The prompt was “bubbles” and we spent quite a lot of time deliberating over interpretations of this, alongside which diversifiers we would try to use. Eventually we settled on doing a multi-character survival game where you play as a bunch of factory workers attempting to escape their workplace after unleashing a frightening toxic bubble into the world. We developed the game based on the diversifiers “Play as 5 characters”, “In a liminal space”, “Y2K”, and “Herding cats”. I was in charge of programming the behavior for the enemy bubble and putting together the minigames which would unlock keys the player needed to escape.
The main struggle I think we had was in our concept, I think the use of diversifiers was done in a way that made the core very conceptually bloated, and I personally wasn’t a huge fan of our interpretation of the prompt. More importantly, the degree to which the concept was bloated resulted in myself working on multiple components and minigames that towards the end our lead informed us that we simply didn’t have the time to integrate them into the game itself.
On the bright side, my role allowed me to somewhat continue where I left off in my previous game jam project, by creating a multitude of unique minigames all with their own gimmicks. It’s unfortunate that the amount of effort and learning I put into this did not fully show in the finals product, but it was overall still a good experience. You can give it a try HERE