New Year New Jam!

The Global Game Jam has come and gone once again. This year yielded surprisingly good results compared to my previous two years. On my team this year was Myself(Jon Harwood), Noah Hildebrandt, Jack Cieczka, Jeremy Lecus and Scott Schmeling. All a bunch of awesome dudes that I love working with. Our game this year winded up being a sort Lemmings/Puzzle platformer type game called How To Game Design where you play as an unseen human wielding a dry erase marker that must guide the stick man Mr.Lemmings to the end of several Levels.

As you can see the art style uses photographs of the actual white board that we had in the room where we were devving. I dont think I could be more a fan of this art style. I think just such a clean and sensible style for a jam game. I also really enjoyed the developing the primary mechanic of the game. The primary mechanic is that you use your marker to place down a green circle and when an object touches the green circle they teleport to the polar opposite side of the circle. Its a Mechanic that I don't think was fully explored in this game so i'm thinking that I might use it for another game at some point.

 My role on the team was general programmer and build master. Overall this game was very simple to program and didn't have very many challenges. Development was overall a very smooth and pleasant experience this year which I enjoyed greatly. Not that that I don't like a challenge but it was refreshing to do a project that actually went entirely according to plan for once.

Our Progress about 24 Hours in.

Overall I would say this jam was a huge success. We made a successful game and even got the majority of the vote when it came to who at MATC had the best game this year. I'm immensely satisfied with HTGD. Please Check it out! :3

Global Game Jam Page:

http://globalgamejam.org/2015/games/how-game-design

Kongregate:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Raid_Plus/how-to-game-design