Games-I-made-in-Global-Game-Jam ramble, part 2. In 2011, I just moved into Maryland. To get used to things, I decided to take a supporting role in a team, rather than work by myself. Our creation was Boomshakalaka, a bomb-dropping game controlled by dropping objects on the keyboard.
The game is downloadable here.
The theme this time was “extinction.” A seemingly deep topic. In fact, the five of us literally wrote out every dictionary definition of it, and attempted to outline every possible game idea on the whiteboard. This process was…excruciating. We sat there for 3 hours, just thinking. Since I’m a gameplay-over-graphics kind of guy, I finally proposed that they make a game that uses an entire keyboard. Each key can be hit only once within the game, thus acting as the primary resource of the game. We’ve finally decided on a tower-defense game where you detonated a grid of mines as the monsters approached your base.
But like last time, this entire idea was thrown away. It was Ruben Brown, this time, that came up with the final game idea: drop whatever on the keyboard. This eventually evolved into a bomb-dropping game under his direction. I remember vehemently rejecting the idea, not because of it ruining my original game design; but rather, the physical harm the control scheme could do to the precious keyboard. Yeah, I’m a stickler for my computer. Regardless, Ruben assured that only his laptop would take the abuse.
In the final runs, we started having merging errors working with Unity and Subversion. Sadly, the explosion effects all disappeared; none of the courses and assets got added in, and the only thing that compiled was the one level displayed in the web link above. It’s a bit sad, really, as we had tanks, jeeps, and mannequins models to completely destroy. Regardless, the game turned out to be a simple casual game that many not into intense gaming could enjoy. It’s simply the lack of content and special effects that really hindered us badly.
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