The last game jam I participated in was the Global Game Jam in January of 2020. Before that I had participated in the GGJ for 2017 and 2018 as well. It was a bit easier back then because all of those took place while I was in college, around other people who had time to do the same thing, hosted by a game development club on top of that.
I had wanted to participate in several game jams between then and now but I always ended up being too busy or other people were too busy. Sure there is nothing wrong with doing a solo jam or using that as an opportunity to make some new friends to jam together with, but neither of those things ended up happening. So when I realized this year's Global Game Jam was coming around I asked people a month in advance and got myself in the mental state for it early on so I could finally do one again. And that's exactly what we did.
The global game jam announces the theme for its jam a week before it is due now. The idea is to still have your jam within a 48 hour time span, just on whatever days you would like. We decided to spread our workload throughout the entire week starting on Monday. I'll leave it up to you if you think that breaks the spirit of a jam or not, but as [somewhat] adults now with full time jobs and lives outside of game dev this was preferred by some of the team over not sleeping for 48 hours straight.
We all wrote down pitches in a format provided by our designer Warren. The theme of “Make Me Laugh” was a tough one to pitch for. Only thing I thought of at first was like playing as a jester in a throne room trying to entertain people in some way, and if you didn't complete that objective properly you would lose. I know not much of an idea, but part of the fun of a jam is everyone collaborating and combining ideas together. Turns out that idea had already been written down in some form and several of us had thought of it as it was definitely a more obvious one to think up. I ended up writing down a similar idea that had the player running around as a comedian entertaining people, pitched as almost a diner dash style type experience, but ultimately I was excited to work on someone else's idea. (Especially because I need to commit a lot of that brainpower to our current main project at Still Pending) We then went through the list, had each person explain their pitch, then voted on which ones we wanted. After two rounds of voting we had decided on one of Warren's pitches:
“The world's smallest dentist must clean plaque buildup to keep his business afloat”
“The player can move, use laughing gas to make clients laugh [and expose their teeth], then use their waterpik to clean the teeth.”
A funny enough idea. We then decided on our engine: Unity. We chose Unity as that is what we are most familiar with together and we had decided our goal was to make a good game, not learn new tech, not that there is a problem with basing a jam around that if that is your goal. From there it was off to the races and honestly kind of a blur. We had fun making decisions together along the way. I don't remember who mentioned having a fish as the boss first. One of the inspirations for the game was Cuphead. I thought that there was a Boss that was a fish in Cuphead but apparently that is a false memory. Yes there are fish enemies, but not a boss specifically. It was brought up that the fish should be based off of Big Mouth Billy Bass which all of us were sold on pretty quickly.
I started by coding player movement and aiming, then moved on to making the main Boss functionality for the attacks to plug in to. I coded the Boss's music note attack and the… shakes room and dentist items fall attack. Very catchy right? The other programmer on the team, Scott, had created a base abstract class for attacks early on that definitely helped speed up this process. The laughing mode functionality mainly took place within the main Boss controller and it was a bit tricky to make it work with the falling items attack as it takes place during that attack specifically. We figured it out though and the code ended up being suitable enough for a jam.
I also implemented most of the animations made by our awesome artists Nate and Preston. They were going for that rubber hose cartoon style, again we might have taken some inspiration from Cuphead, I mean uh Steam Boat Willy, which at the time of writing this recently went public domain, yeah that's it. I also implemented the audio by our awesome composer Conner who made music to mimic the type of music Big Mouth Billy Bass sings which was pretty funny.
Submitting was of course down to the wire as it always is with a jam, at least for me. The jam ended at 4pm CST on Sunday and we submitted everything a couple minutes after. I don't think they actually locked down submissions till the next day due to issues they were having with their revamped site but we stuck with our initial submission. It's up on itch.io for anyone to play. We may be making some minor bug fixes here and there so if you want to check out the submitted version the executable is on the jam site.
The theme was "Make Me Laugh" but we think we may have ended up making something terrifying instead. I will let you be the judge.
Global Game Jam Site Page
Project on GitHub
