Creating Wave Panic

This year, we participated in the epic Global Game Jam. I believe this is the biggest game jam in the world. Let's talk about numbers: more than 36,000 participants in 702 sites across 95 countries, over 7,000 games created.

Like every year, all people should stick to the jam's theme: waves.

Yeah, waves. However you want to interpret it. This means it could be waves on the beach, water waves, sound waves, sin and cos graphs - or the typical Mexican wave:

So, it began.

The image above is one of the early paper designs. It's funny because it looks pretty close to the final result.

This is an early to-do list. All the game's concept was too abstract. We needed to land all the ideas into detailed descriptions, models, diagrams. We divided the work: Vincent was creating the character's models meanwhile I was developing a proof of concept of the game idea.

It's hard to code without any direction, so I like to draw class diagrams. It doesn't matter if the game is simple, it helps me to have a better idea of what I'm doing, it also improves my memorization. Did I mention I have fish memory span?

The next pic is a last minute to-do list. We had a harsh time looking for sounds and music. Vincent is a 3D artist, I'm a coder, our team didn't have any musical talent. The bunch of numbers in the bottom part are my calculations - we added eye tracker device compatibility.

At the end, we came up with this videogame:

Visit our Global Game Jam entry to download this game.

If you want to know more about Vincent's work visit his Facebook profile, he has a lot of cool models made.