Global Game Jam 2018

On January 26, 2018 I took part in yet another Global Game Jam! Working with a team of six that formed at the event we had a bit of a slow start. Once we got things under way, we worked hard to create a game in Unity 3D within 48 hours. The theme for the jam was “transmission”, so naturally we were overconfident and scoped out a networked, multiplayer strategy game. We envisaged a two (or more) player game based on a graph of nodes representing computers in a network. Each player would have a starting node, and the aim would be to take over more of the network than your opponents by the end of the time limit.

Despite none of us having tackled a project like that before, we launched in to it and quickly decided to base our game on the Network Lobby example from the Unity Asset Store. While we started out strong, we quickly realized how little we knew about networking in Unity 3D and made some concessions to our scope in an attempt to get the game across the line.

Our final game ended up having two players over a network clicking on as many nodes as they could to “capture” them before the time limit expired. The game did play quite well over the network, but getting that working took up so much time that we weren’t able to implement as much gameplay as we had wanted. The end result was really only a small subset of what we wanted to achieve, but it did work, and we did learn a lot in the process. Particularly about scoping appropriately. I’m looking forward to see what we can come up with at the next Global Game Jam.