Overview

Deep Space Fractalling was made for Ludem Dare 48, in which the theme was Deeper and Deeper.

Overview

The Dark Wages was made for Ludem Dare 47, in which the theme was Stuck in a Loop.

Overview

Baby Dragon was made for Ludem Dare 46, in which the theme was Keeping it Alive.

Overview

The Cult of the Hungry Scrungus was made for Ludem Dare 43, in which the theme was "Sacrifices Must Be Made".

Overview

Coloroboros was made for Ludem Dare 42, in which the theme was “Running out of Space“.

Paperlanche was an endless runner created for the 2017 Sunshine Game Jam; for which the theme was ‘The Elephant in the Room‘.

Read about it on waypoint

Overview

Party Poopers! Was an entry in the 2016 Fab 48 Hour Game Game making challenge. The theme for this year was: Love - Power - Surprise.

Party Poopers is a 2D party brawler where up to 5 players take control of a love-heart at a surprise party. Each player has 2 minutes to collect as many tokens as possible before the timer runs out. During this time, players are able to knock tokens off of other players by hitting them with the stream from their party poppers, and zip around the arena with carefully timed double jumps
As players collect more and more tokens, they become more and more engorged with Love. The Player with the most love gains a special power: the surprise beam!

Personal Contribution

My primary role during the production of Party Poopers! Was as a sound designer and sound programmer.

I mixed all the in game sound effects and created the score.

Addressing the brief

One of the primary goals of the FAB48HR jam was to create a game that related to the 3 words provided at the beginning of the challenge.

In Relation to the theme of Love - Power - Surprise, Party Poopers! did the following:

Love - As the Iconic representation of love, Hearts were one of the primary motifs used throughout the game. The characters were hearts, they collected heart-shaped tokens (Tokens of affection, if you will) and the primary inspiration behind the main theme of the game was the heartbeat. In broader terms, Love can also be found in the act of participating in the celebration of a family member or friend.

Power - The player with the most tokens gains The Power, The ability to fire a wide beam horizontally across the screen. This allowed the player in the lead the slight chance to maintain their lead. As they were often the primary target of the other players, the power gave the leading player some chance to remain in the lead.

Surprise - Nothing quite embodies a surprise like a surprise party! There was also an element of surprise in the fact that a number of the balloons strewn about the arena contained tokens.

Reflection

While I enjoyed the process of making Party Poopers! immensely (despite going through chemotherapy at the time), I am also a little disappointed at the surface-level execution of the Game Jams themes. The majority of the Themes were exhibited through the visual and auditory aesthetic of the piece. From a ludological standpoint, the only  theme expressed through gameplay was power - wherein players would be given a power-up for being in the lead.

I also felt as though the gameplay lacked depth. At any given time, players had very few options for how to move around the stage or to engage with other players. While this could partly be expected due to the simple controls, games like Moppin's incredible Downwell Manage to squeeze incredible amounts of depth out of only 3 buttons (Best explained in Mark Brown from GMTK's fantastic video on the game)