Platform: Unity | Time: 48 Hours | Role: Designer – Programmer | Team Size: 3
Story: To smoke or not to smoke! That is the question! Control a jammer’s good or bad conscience, and convert their brain waves to help them make the “right” choice! The game is about two sides battling to gain control, the neurons resist the attack themselves and the player gets a limited amount of time to conquer all they can.
Design Challenge: To design a game that captured the concept of Waves as dictated by the theme of the 2017 Global Game Jam.
My Contributions: I directed the design of the project as well as assisted the lead programmer with tasks such as adding the neuron layer on top of our atom system. As well as programming the user interface surrounding the game.
Source Code: Available here
GitHub Repository Link: https://github.com/tauseefk/game-jam-2017
Executables: Available here
Global Game Jam Link: http://globalgamejam.org/2017/games/bicameral-mind
Development
Made for the Pittsburgh Global Game Jam 2017, this years theme was waves. Considering this theme we came up with the idea of brain waves, and firing intent into neurons which would spread like a wave.
What we did well
- Made a Cool toy
- Art style cool
- Lot of work done in amount of time
- Leveraged version control well
Improvement
There was one major issue during development:
- When the main mechanic was put in place we should have not added the neuron later on top of it. We should have instead focused on making what we had fun, by e.g. adding in multiplayer.
Several issues arose during play testing:
- Turn based FPS game with one set of controls that makes the other person have to watch the first persons play doesn’t work
- Should have kept neurons closer together
- Explain instructions better – player didn’t understand
- Players attacked the wall paper
- Players didn’t like the good ending, thought it should have been related to smoking e.g throws away his cigarettes