What do you get, when you do a game jam, in one* hour, with thirteen people?

An hell of a time, for one.

We spent a Frunch at the Collective pulling together a game. Everyone had something to do — art, audio, PR, programming, design… and we not only ended up with a game for you to enjoy, we ended up with a documentary too.

Give it a shot with a friend, or read the press kit.

* I was the only one in Unity, so I actually spent about 2.5-3 hours on the game, integrating the assets, and getting gameplay in. Next time we need a tech artist. :)

This past July, I was one of the organizers for the Boston-area MolyJam. This year, the prompt was from a selection of quotes from Peter Molyneux himself.

I was worried I might be pulled off due to duties that organizing the event might entail, so I decided to whip something up on my own.

PROMPT

I’m not punishing you for button mashing; I’m rewarding you for not button mashing, and that is a really big distinction.

I took some heavy inspiration from the humor that QWOP evokes from making movement difficult. Multiplayer games like WrestleJump are very easy to pick up, and a blast to play. What if there was a Western-style duel game, where you had really floppy arms?

After a short amount of time, I had some joint constraints working:

Thanks to the magic of the Unity Asset Store, I quickly whipped together a scene:
After a little bit of work on the joints, it was simply too easy to get the player to manipulate the shoulder/elbow joints. I decided to switch gameplay to be a bit more based on timing.

After a weekend of work, I ended up with a finished game. I don’t think I’ll pursue the idea much further — through this little experiment it became pretty obvious that much of the challenge and enjoyment of QWOP and Wrestle Jump come from balancing against gravity.