Cozy home – human vs cowman

Context

I attended the 2019 globalgamejam.org gamejam hosted by Cibap and Windesheim in Zwolle, Netherlands.

Together with 3 other people I constructed the game ‘cozy home – human vs cowman’ during the 48 hours gamejam.

Product

You can find the game over at https://globalgamejam.org/2019/games/cozy-home-human-vs-cowman, it represents the state at the end of the gamejam.

  • Team spirit
  • Your destiny
  • Just chillin’
  • There is no cow level

The objective of the gamejam was to incorporate the ‘home’ feeling. We did this by making a game where the obvious objective is to take the other’s home. But the real ending is to get along peacefully (hidden ending).

The game features 1 level, 2 playable characters (human / cowman), 2 modes (attack / defend), 1 normal ending, 1 hidden ending. 3 actions per character. Basic pixel art, basic sounds. No music.
It is made using Unity.

The GlobalGameJam has no global competition. It is about the fun. But for some competitive element, each local jams has a jury.
We got the following review:
Movement 3/5
Theme 4/5
Art 3/5
Music 3/5
Interface 1/5

We did have fun building the game, but we didn’t end up receiving a reward. The interface did not work out as expected, we had a hard time delivering the right game-play experience. But overall a nice try.

My part

At the start I focused on facilitating the creative process. With no real artists in our team and little game building experience I had to make up for it by tapping into the collective art feelings. I did this with some proven discussion facilitating techniques I learned along the way while being in design processes of enterprise software projects.

During the whole process I kept on leading the team, helping them maintain focus. My goal was to keep everyone onboard and maximize personal gains.

I did code a few lines. Most of the stuff I did was maintaining structure / improving code quality. I did introduce Dependency Injection (using Zenject) later on because we did slowdown due to badly structured code.

I made a (Dutch) blog post about my experience, you can read it here.

Related stuff

Random order, tooling used

  • Unity
  • GIT source control
  • Open source (
    Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 https://github.com/crappy-art-ggj-2019/cozyhome)
  • C#
  • Play-testing (live prototypes and paper prototypes)
  • Creative processes
  • Code structure (Dependency Injection, Zenject)