wfmag.cc \ 49 For this year’s Global Jam,
our team made a fighting
game with only four
buttons; the gimmick was
that you control the game
with a set of Donkey
Konga bongos.Game Jams: The sweetest fruitsInterface
Lovers in a
Dangerous SpacetimeSpawned at the 2012 Global Game Jam by Matt Hamill
and Jamie Tucker, this adorable shoot-‘em-up begs for
co-operative play. You control a rabbit, frog, or alien
as you platform around your little spaceship with your
partner, switching between a variety of control panels.
There are four different types of panel: engines, shields,
lasers, and powered-up weapons.
Your mission: rescue cute space bunnies across
a procedurally generated landscape, while defeating
astronomically huge bosses like Ursa Major. Employing
strategy to switch between the various control panels
with more than two players in a cramped ship deck,
it can get a little too hectic. A crew of two space
cadets, however, is the perfect way to experience this
colourfully pleasing sci-fi romp.Keep Talking and
Nobody ExplodesA co-op bomb-disposal title best played in VR, Keep
Talking will have you pulling your hair out and shouting
at your friends however you choose to play. One person
disables the bomb within a time limit, while the other
players provide directions, using a ‘classified’ manual
that only they can see. At 2014’s Global Jam, developer
Brian Fetter noticed how VR players were cut off from
the rest of the world while others waited for their turn,
limiting the options for multiplayer VR games.
He thought to use the isolation of VR to his
advantage, and made a game that two or more people
could play together with a single headset. The number
of modules and difficulty of each bomb increases as
you go through the campaign, while the art and music
create a cheesy, nineties action movie feel. Brilliant fun.Screencheat
Coming out of 2014’s Global Jam, Screencheat is a
sandbox split-screen shooter where everyone, including
their weapons, are invisible to you. The only way to
kill opponents is by looking at their screen to suss out
their location – or, in other words, cheat. Were you that
annoying friend who only won Mario Kart’s battle mode
because you kept sneaking a look at their screen? Then
this is the game for you.
The environment is coloured like a child’s Lego
creation, with distinctive landmarks and points of
interest to help you figure out where each player is on
the map. The game even has a murder mystery mode
where you kill specific targets with the right weapons to
earn extra points.Superhot
This ‘7-Day FPS Game Jam’ marvel lets you live out your
slow-mo Matrix fantasies; it’s a futuristic shooter where
time only moves when you do. This mechanic creates
a great fusion, merging the gameplay of a shooter with
the strategy of a puzzle game.
It’s been hailed as a “full body VR experience” where
the connection between input and feedback creates an
uncanny level of immersion. One player was reportedly
so absorbed that he kicked over a monitor, forgetting
that his feet weren’t even being tracked.
Indeed, the response to Superhot was so warm that
its developers reworked their proof-of-concept into a
commercial game, first released in 2016. It’s since gone
on to sell over two million copies.01
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