Nori & Jumbo - January 2025 Game Jam Entry

About

I formed and led a team to create this game in two weeks for the January 2025 Pirate Software Game Jam. I used this project to get experience directing a team. The team was composed of:

  • Me - Game Design, team coordination, programming, and art
  • Joe D. aka sidetilt - Sound design, music composition
  • Water - Character design, art, animation

Our approach to development involved first doing a warmup project to see how well we worked together. Our warmup project was a microgame for the community built microgame collection, Loungeware. After successfully developing a fun microgame, we went on to finish our game jam game and received a positive review that ended "...Overall, this was a really solid submission with a lot of potential, and I genuinely enjoyed it! Keep up the great work!"

Development Details

The theme of the game jam was "You are the weapon". We decided to build upon the tried and true formula of a 2D dungeon crawler like the early Legend of Zelda games and The Binding of Isaac. Our twist was that the player would be able to swap between two separate characters that had the ability to transform into a weapon the other could use. This core mechanic was used to design puzzles and proved to be intuitive and a fun new approach to the genre.

The following technologies were used to build the game:

  • Team Management: Discord (communication), Trello (task management), Miro (schedule and brainstorming)
  • Engine: GameMaker Studio
  • Scripting Language: GML (GameMaker Language, C-Like)
  • Graphics: Clip Studio Paint, Aseprite
  • SFX/Music: Ableton Live, Logic Pro X, Audacity
  • Documentation/Design: Google Docs, Google Sheets, Excalidraw

Development Documents

The game design was developed first. Based off that, I then created the asset requirement documents so my team could work in parallel.

Retrospective

Directing a team to build a fully playable prototype in two weeks was a large undertaking, here are some highlights and lowlights from development.

Successes

  • We finished on time with no game breaking bugs.
  • The feedback for the game has been really positive. Most people play it to completion.
  • I taught my two teammates how to use version control with Github and Github Desktop so they could contribute to the project directly.
  • I learned several new skills in GameMaker for structuring game systems.

Difficulties

  • We had to cut back on our original scope to meet the deadline. This meant that some assets went unused and some of the teams time was wasted.
  • Because we were in crunch time as the deadline approached, many quality of life features for the game were dropped.
  • Because much of the sprite work was not completed quick enough, our sound designer had to go largely off imagination instead of finished animations in the game.

Try it out

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