Preparation
Incandescency is the second game that I have made with a team during Global Game Jam 2019. This time I have formed a big team consisting of 7 students (Including me): Robert Broer, Danny Dorstijn, Huub van de Hoeve, Age Kruijssen, Daniel Rooth and Maxim Petrov. This time we also had a 3D artist onboard so we didn’t had resort to searching online for 3D assets. This is a pretty big team compared to the previous GGJ which only had 4 members in total. This years theme was ‘What home means to you’, which can be interpreted in many creative ways.
Concept
During the brainstorm phase, we made everyone come up with a concept and present it to the team. We ended up creating a concept based on all the previous concepts that were presented to the team; we took some ideas from the other concepts to make a new concept. The concept is about you, an alien who got captured, and your friends trying to escape from a facility in area 51. You have to work together with the other aliens to get out of the facility. We have decided to go for the experimental gameplay diversifier and make the game into a 2-4 man co-op experience. This was something I never have done before so it was quite interesting after we pulled this off. In order to make this possible, we had to use 4 different controllers because it would be very cumbersome for the players to only use 1 keyboard to control their aliens. Fortunately, a lot of us have brought one so we could start right away with testing the game with 4 players.
The goal of the game is to get all the aliens to a spaceship. The spaceship is locked behind a gate which can be opened when the aliens have collected all the key cards throughout the map. However, the aliens are sensitive to ‘spooky’ things and can get startled by the smallest things and this will affect the mentality (mood points) of the alien. If the mood point gets too low, the alien will freeze up and cannot move. In order to increase the mood point, a different alien (player) has to be near you. This is shown via a beam visual so you will know when you are in range. The game will end when every alien has frozen up. A rather disturbing end screen will appear when this happens.
Thoughts after GGJ 2019
We worked much more organized this time compared to the previous GGJ. We divided the tasks via post-it notes so we know who is working on what. Every time when someone wants to add something new to the game, we held a meeting so everyone could give their input.
Although this game didn’t win any awards, I was still proud of the team for how far we came and the way we worked together. The experience was pleasant and I’ll be here again for the 3rd global game jam.
GGJ Game Site: https://globalgamejam.org/2019/games/incandescency
