Gearful

Context

I attended the 2020 globalgamejam.org gamejam hosted by BUas in Breda, Netherlands. On our location over 200 jammers did a hackaton-alike attempt at creating novel games.

Together with two other jammers, Tom and Ben, I constructed the game ‘gearful’ during the 48 hours gamejam.

Product

You can find the game over at https://globalgamejam.org/2020/games/project-gearful-8, it represents the state at the end of the gamejam.

  • Kickoff GGJ 2020 BUas
  • Teamwork: Tom, Ben and me
  • Jam location diner
  • Development of Gearful

The theme of the gamejam this year was ‘repair’. So our game is about repairing a machine. It is a puzzle game were you align gears and remove obstacles to rotate the ending gear.

The game features 9 levels with increasing difficulty. There are 3 gear sizes. Some puzzles require interaction from multiple angles to solve it. you can interact with gears or with sliding bars (that block the gears). And the whole game is physics based.
It is a 3D game. You can rotate freely around the puzzle. The games comes with a background music.
It is made using Unity and a lot of freeware assets.

The GlobalGameJam has no global competition. It is about the fun. But for some competitive element, each local jams has a jury.
However the organisation of this GGJ site was a bit confusing, a lot of the events that needed all jammers to participate weren’t that organized, so we had a hard time to get our game noticed.

We did have fun building the game, a good team interaction and accomplished quite well what we aimed for at the start. For me that’s all I wanted so I really enjoyed this jam.

My part

As with creating games: it was a team effort. I did focus on a few parts however:

  • I had prepared a game concept on forehand that helped to speed up the initial phase massively.
  • Main work was the preparation, testing and Q&A of the technology required: physics gears, physics sliding bars with mouse interaction, rotation detection with gears, objective gear mechanic, game-loop logic, menu logic.
  • I created the main menu and the in-game HUD.
  • I helped maintain focus on the required and the optional.
  • I helped by staying positive and celebrate the accomplishments.

Related stuff

Random order, tooling used