A couple weeks ago I took part in a rather quirky gamejam that started out as a joke, quickly escalating into a global event across dozens of countries. If you’re unfamiliar, there’s a parody account of the wildly ambitious world famous game designer Peter Molyneux, naturally named Peter Molydeux (naturally), who tweets the most absurd game ideas with the intent to both make us smile and to make us think. So next thing you know someone from Double Fine jokes about having a gamejam to bring his ideas to life, and suddenly I’m in a room with a hundred other people making games with the intent to change the world (or not).
Having been the programmer and artist on recent past gamejams, I decided this time I didn’t want to code so that I could focus on just the art. Chelsea of course was already on my team, but we needed a programmer, preferably one who could work in Flash. We ended up scoring three more guys: a programmer, a project lead / programmer, and a designer. An editor from Joystiq was creeping behind us for like an hour while we brainstormed, so you can read his various mentionings of us here.
48 hours later, our team of 5 came out with something fairly cool: A game called Run Love Run, which is a 2-player co-op game where both players must move in sync with each other in order to progress further. Moving and jumping independently causes you to fall apart (and eventually break), so there’s a fun challenge in jumping when your partner would jump, and having your partner jump when they think you will.
Play Run Love Run at runloverun.net!
Since Chelsea and I were for the most part only doing audio and art respectively, we finished a little early and decided to quickly jam out another game in the 3 or so hours remaining for the event. The game is a single button experience game called crowscare, the spacebar being your only means of interaction. We ended up going with this tweet about a game in which you are a scarecrow in a world with just one bird. The time limit of 3 hours made decisions fairly easy (“Pick the quickest thing”), so we had just enough time to add in a last minute camera zoom effect that helps sell the narrative we were going for.
Play crowscare here!
All in all, there were over 300 games created that weekend, almost all of which are playable from the official gamejam website. A lot of the same popular themes ended up being picked by many, though each interpretation is unique, from pigeons saving depressed rooftop-bound businessmen, to bowing pins that become more human each time they’re struck down.
