Wow! Just participated in 2 game jams in back-to-back weekends.

I finished hosting Marist Game Society’s student GameJam last week and this weekend, Carrot Island decided to participate in a MiniLudum Dare. We’re all over the place!
As they say, To the moon!!! ┗(°0°)┛

Read on to see what our games are about!

So first up is Asteroids 3D from the Marist Game[Space]Jam for Fall 2013! We decided to take a spin on the old classic asteroids game and do a Unity turret spin on it. Originally, we were intending crazy stuff like Oculus support and all this multiplayer stuff…. but it became clear that in 24 hours we couldn’t really accomplish all of that.

I did all of the programming for the game, entirely in C#. We had 5 or so artists working on the game this time because no one in Carrot Island had done 3D modelling before and they wanted to learn. So everyone took up 1 or 2 jobs to do, like one did the turret and another did the windshield. It worked out great, and the music came out fantastic too. We’re currently working on pushing this to some app store just to get something out there.

You can check out all the other cool space games made in the Marist GameJam here.

Next up is the Mini Ludum Dare 46 challenge we did, which was shark themed. Our game is called… *ahem*… Swag Shark : The YoloBringer.
Don’t even think about questioning it. It was a ludicrous idea that just spawned and stuck. Essentially, you’re a swag-tastic shark in a beat-em-up style fighter that has to yolo his way through a bunch of eels, blowfish, and job-shooting dolphins.

Made entirely in Construct 2, I again did all of the programming but this time we didn’t have [or need] 5 artists. My friend Rob did the awesome music, Nick lead, Christina did the sprites. So it was just us 4 essentially making a game in about ~20 hours. The event was 48 hours but we were pretty busy catching up after GameJam anyway. We still managed to pull it off.

Originally we were aiming for CraftyJS. But after trying to find documentation and playing around with silly-made tutorials, it became clear to me that it would not have worked at all. It looked broken and very limited. I didn’t want to spend 20 hours solving and figuring out an obscure game engine and then another 20 hours trying to piece together a subpar game I knew I could make way better and in half the time with Construct 2. It was one of those “unnecessary risks” that would’ve lead to more pain and headache than worth. So this game was what we came up with in the end! We’re also looking to push this to some app stores for kicks, free of course. You can even find it on the Scirra arcade front.