Our Global Game Jam game!
(Play)
(See at GGJ’s website and rate)
It was made in 48h for the theme:
Our group had 9 people on total, so we’d like to thank everybody that helped us:
AMILTON MACÊDO
2D Artist
ARTHUR PROTASIO
Sound Designer/Producer
LUCAS MARINS
Programmer
HAMILTON LIMA JR.
Game Designer/ Producer
HUMBERTO CARDOSO
Concept Artist/2D Artist
MATEUS LACERDA
Programmer
It was pretty fun!
First, we thought about lots of stuff because of the theme. Then, we selected the ones everybody liked.
In the end, we had “dissect” and “taste its own poison”.
Then, we agreed on a Game concept: We’d have a race in which the player could take parts of the character’s body and throw at his opponents. But he if he lost everything he would die.
The track should be round, to mimic the Ouroboros format.
After agreeing on that, we took 3 hours to think about the main character and the game mechanics.
The programmers agreed to use the engine “Construct 2” because most of them had previous experience with it and its good for making 2D games.
They had to discuss, though, the game’s dynamic, because it’s really difficult to manipulate circular curves using that kind of engine. In the end, they agreed to rely on the art, making a loopable scenario that would imply a circular route, observed by a centralized bystander.
The artists worked separately on various character concepts. Lego like, Mr Potato Head like. Here are some:
After that, we all met again. We decided the main character would after all be a snake.
This is the amazing concepts Humberto made for us to decide its actual appearance:
We then decided the enemies would initially be other snakes, with different skin colors. The main character would have a black power of some sort, where it’d put all the items it got from the floor, so that he could throw them afterwards.
We choose the cutesnake, as it was smoother and seemed like it would please most people.
But the putting stuff in the hair and throw it at others thing started to bother us. It would end up breaking the race feeling, as it was kind of a slower activity. So we decided to make a two players game. One would do the race, shoot the enemies on the way and the other would catch the stuff, put them in the hair and try to hit the other racers. That was a good solution. It would both preserve the fun in the game and enable us to get a GGJ 2012 Achievement: Collaborative Casual/Hardcore: (Two players: one casual, one hardcore) Collaborative play for two, but one player has more to do than the other (or the difficulty level is different between them).
We then proceeded to actually making the game. Humberto made the characters and the splash screen, Amilton the scenery and the game over screen and I (Rachel) made the stuff to throw, the guns and the other game screens and huds.
There was another event happening in the same building as the Game Jam and so some of our group members couldn’t help all the time.
That made everything more challenging. But that’s the great part about Jams. Nothing really works out but even so everybody has fun.
The Game itself became more and more apart from the original idea. We didn’t have time to make other races or to implement the guns ='( and we had to give up the idea of a circular race to make the game more interesting and more “Downhill”.
Even so, it was great and we love that we were able to make it after all.
Check out a few of the final sprites:
Cool? You can check out the actual game here: AFRO HAWK’S PRO DOWNHILL
If you’d like to access the game’s page at GGJ website: AFRO HAWK’S PRO DOWNHILL
Thanks and Enjoy! =)
Sahara Penguins 