In 2017 I participated in the Global Game Jam, spending just under 48 hours creating a simple game about directing messages in bottles to the proper recipients. I worked together with Thomas, who also studied Game Design in Groningen. He created the entire art for the game, whereas I programmed it; which I usually do at Game Jams. You can find the result of that weekend here, and in this post I will describe how it was made.
The theme of this years Global Game Jam was “Waves”. Based on this, the first idea we came up with was that of moving objects with waves, where the player could create those waves. Since that seemed a bit too obvious, I wanted to do some general brainstorming on the topic, and while we did come up with other interesting ideas, we rejected them because we didn’t like them as much or they didn’t seem as feasible. So, we want back to the idea of moving objects – bottles – with waves created by the player. The perspective should be a sort of mixed topdown, with the waves being straight topdown and everything else being somewhat angled, such as the bottles and the islands. Based on this we got to work, and at the end of the first day I had the waves mostly working, and Thomas had created animated bottle sprites and, after some discussion, also the five island sprites. I have no idea when we decided to have five colors, but it made sense to just make enough different colors. We could always choose to put less colors into a level. When we decided on the bottle design, Thomas proposed a flag sticking out of the bottles, with the respective color. Based on that, I had the idea to add shapes to those flags as well, and as an added bonus this makes it possible for colourblind people to enjoy the game as well.
On the next day, I finished up the waves and islands, while Thomas worked on graphics and animations, which I then also implemented. We even added an easteregg supermode, where the spawn rate of the bottles was turned up by 100. All this was ready and working well in time for the first playtest session, where all developers could go around and play other people’s games, and gather feedback on their own. Unfortunately, not all games were playable yet, but for us it was a good feedback moment, and we did get some positive reactions out of the game, which was very nice.
By the end of the second day, we had the core gameplay done, and I even added a simple pause menu with a working restart function. I also added our two basic obstacles, the rock and the whirlpool. We had a single level with five working islands, including the person that throws the bottles. This had been enough to demonstrate the core game mechanic to our testers, and now we even had some additional elements, adding a bit of complexity to the gameplay.
On the last day, our original plan was to implement boats, but we soon had different ideas. We wanted to implement an intro-sequence, to introduce the gameplay without having to explain it. We also had the idea to add a system of reaction bubbles that would appear whenever the person on an island received a bottle, and would show them happy or sad, depending on if the bottle was correct or not. We later expanded this system to also have each message contain a certain image, which would also be shown when a correct bottle was received. We then used this system for the intro, where two people tried to communicate, but could only do so using a bottle. This intro then later transformed into our title screen, a feature that we were very proud of. Additionally, our game did not contain any words whatsoever, so we chose to also display the title of our game using symbols instead of words: “✉️ ➡ 🍾”. Sadly, we could not add this title any where on the GGJ site, because they do not allow emoji.
During the final showcase a lot of people played our game. It might have been more if we hadn’t been far away in the corner, but it was still plenty enough. Most people liked the game, and playtimes varied from just a few minutes to longer sessions, where the players were actively invested in the gameplay, which was a fantastic success for us. Our game was also a great hit with children, probably because it’s controls are very intuitive. When the jury came around to judge our game, the jury’s playtesters, three young children, where very captivated by the game and only moved on to the next after repeated prompting. In the end, there was a small award ceremony where we got the third place overall, which we were very proud of, especially since the competition was also at a very high level. Overall, we were both very happy with what we achieved with just two people in this little time, and we’d like to think that the players were too.
