Global Game Jam 2014 - Candy Crash

If you look hard enough, you can find opportunities to collaborate with others to build games. This past weekend, the Global Game Jam kicked off with thousands of teams at hundreds of sites, in dozens of countries. I participated this year at the UCSD campus, hosted by the VGDC group. Being my first onsite jam, I was pleasantly surprised to find a very nice gaggle of game developers, of all levels of experience. Several talented groups were formed with an impressive array of engineers, designers, artists, musicians and dreamers. Check out the Game Jam site page to see all the teams and impressive entries!

“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”

This year’s theme was a difficult idea to parse. However, out of that phrase, our team concocted Candy Crash, a short, profoundly amusing saga about a man’s truly unhealthy obsession with sweets, set in a candified platformer world.

The team had a blast putting this together, with probably the largest contributing set of team members at the jam. Most of the code and design was constructed by up-and-comers, Patrick Traynor (Clockwork Cat) , Jeff Johnson, Vishnu Narayana, and some veteran code by Jon Ross (Bartlet Jones Supernatural Detective Agency), with me bringing Unity experience and consultation. Our artists made the world beautiful with an array of complimentary styles. Backgrounds and the King character were painted by Jeff Berry. Pixel art was painstakingly blitted to the screen by Keith McDade. Devlin JD of Bartlet Jones added his flair for character design to our band of enemies. Musical themes were created by yours truly to bring the sweetness and accentuate the subtle mood shifts of our story. Dmitry Andreyev provided our Boss’ theme. While we couldn’t fit in everything we originally planned into our game within the 48 hour time limit, there is much to enjoy in the subtle (and not-so-subtle) humor present throughout the game. Those who play through its entirety (it’s really short) will be rewarded, so give it a try!

Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen!