Feb 23, 2017 4 min read

Wizard Smash: Global Game Jam 17

The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world's largest yearly game jam event. It is a challenge for 'game creators' from around the world, to get together and build a game, from scratch, based on a common theme, all is just 48 hours.
Though we didn't officially register with GGJ and sign in at one of their venues, a bunch of us thought it would be fun to take up the challenge from home. So Casper (developer), Daan (artist), Samantha (artist) and I got together and camped out at Casper's to see what we could hash out in one weekend.

We started late on a Friday evening and the first (and smartest) thing we did was to finalise our game concept before calling it a night. This year's theme was WAVES. So began the brain storming... a lot of ideas started flying about! Some good, some mediocre, some impossible, but one stuck and evolved into something we felt would be super fun to build and play. And so we came up with..

A MULTIPLAYER WIZARD BRAWLER IN OUTTER SPACE!

Ok, right. I know it doesn't look like much yet, but this is just a quick hashed out paper prototype. But here is what we had after two insane days of work.

In this game, every player is a wizard who must defend their crystal tower, while trying to destroy their opponent's by draining it's energy. If a player's tower is destroyed, it's game over for them. If this sounds easy enough, you'd be right. That's why we created a treacherous and unstable arena of revolving stones and falling platforms. Still easy? Yeah, that's why we added the ominous black hole at the core. Go too close to it and be prepared to be stringified into oblivion.

May the best Wizard win!

Blue turns Green's crystal tower into dust!

Besides maneuvering around an unstable platform, the players can do the following three actions: heal their own crystal tower to survive, drain their opponent's crystal tower to defeat them, and use a super power called shock-wave to shove each other of the platform or into the deadly black hole at the core!

Yellow blasts a helpless Green into the abyss of space

A stunned Yellow gets sucked into the black hole

We spent a good 48 hours mashing away at our laptops, taking breaks only to sleep or get something to eat (and watch an episode of Rick & Morty). The best part was that even though I only met Daan and Samantha for the first time that weekend (I knew Casper from a previous game jam), we had chemistry and made a great team, keeping each other motivated right to the end.

Being my first game jam, I'm proud that I got to make some valuable contributions to it. I programmed the character movement, calculating which platforms they were on and if they were in motion, stable or falling into the depths of nowhere. I also build the shock-wave superpower that blasts each other around. Finally, I also tweaked the variables of the game, calculating the chance and dynamics of the game to make it "feel just right".

It's always a bit tricky building features that revolve around chance, because it's so subjective. Some find it too fast, other's too slow or too easy, etc. In the end however, with a lot of team play-testing, we struck a good balance making the game not just playable, but fun and addictive.

If you have Unity and a few compatible XInput controllers, you can grab the source code from https://github.com/noahdecoco/ggj2017 and play the build yourself. Hard as we worked, there wasn't enough time to implement a menu system, so you have to restart the game in Unity after every battle.

Over that weekend, I documented our progress so that I could put it all in a montage. It's always fun to see the evolution of a project. Hope you enjoy it!