Send Them Home
Global Game Jam 2019 Submission
Project Description
Send them Home is the game I built over the course of 48 hours with the help of two other people in the TagusPark IST campus for the 2019 edition of Global Game Jam. In this experimental little game, you and a friend play as two librarians trying to help classic fairytale characters return to the book they belong to. The theme for this jam was “Home”.
What is the Global Game Jam?
“The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world’s largest game jam event (game creation) taking place around the world at physical locations. Think of it as a hackathon focused on game development.”
The Jam
For this jam, we really wanted to be able to have two people collaborating to fulfill a common goal, since we thought that aligned perfectly with the theme.
We eventually came up with this idea of having each player control a different character. On the left, you must look for books and keep track of where you store them because there is no real way of telling them apart, other than memorizing colors or coming up with an organization system. On the right, you must read the prompts given to you by the characters and figure out the book you are looking for and then communicate with your partner to locate that book, ultimately arriving at the correct solution for each “customer”.
All of this makes for a chaotic, stress-inducing but hilarious experience that makes for a fun couple of minutes. All of the code and art assets were created by us within the 48 hours given, and I can say we were all pretty proud of our performance and can vouch for what a great time it was.
Development
This was the first game jam that I got to work with other people and so, the development cycle was substantially different from working alone, it actually turned out to be a nice change of pace!
After the idea was set in stone it was time to split tasks and get to work. Below you can see some examples of me getting the gameplay mechanics in place for the player on the left side of the screen.
Play it here!
To read more on the project or play it for yourself, click the link below:
Visit the jam page to play Send Them Home On Windows here.