First game jam of 2024

This month had the Global Game Jam 2024 happen, in which I participated with three other people. This time the team had two programmers and two game designers. The other game designer agreed to work on level design part for this one, which meant that I focused a bit more on finding the right sounds and other assets for the game.

Unfortunately my health wasn’t really on top of things this time and I had to cut the big workday of saturday short during the afternoon. But this is the sort of thing that happens in the workplaces too and you just got to roll with it, adjust, and try to get the best out of the situation. Thankfully my teammates were excellent and managed to do all we planned the day before and after I got home and got some rest in, I managed to get most of the sounds ready for implementation.

The theme of the jam was “Make me laugh”. The other game designer had the main idea of an endless runner where the player was controlling a dinosaur and to that we added some janky ragdolling to make it look silly and by adding a design pillar of exaggeration, we achieved a game that made every tester laugh when they played it. I think we can call that a success with regards to the theme.

Since this is the 2nd jam in a row where I have ended up with making a runner type game, I think I’d like to try a non-runner next time. I am also working on putting together a “jam kit” as a game designer so I can quickly do different basic game type setups for testing, which should help in future game jams.

Our game for GGJ2024 runs on windows pc and can be found at a teammates itch, on https://salomes-crescent.itch.io/walkythedinosaur