Guernsey’s Global Games Jam 2017

Last years Global Games Jam lead to the creation of Sacrificial Inferno. For those who don’t know, Sacrificial Inferno is a procedurally generated, permadeath, hack and slash, retro 2D platformer which we’re working on. As you can imagine I was pretty excited to attend again this year.

Initially, Marc and I agreed to team up but we ended up with a team of five shortly after arriving. Four programmers and an artist/sound-man. Shortly after the theme of ‘waves’ was announced, we toyed with a couple of ideas but ultimately ended up creating Stealth Shoal. Stealth Shoal turned out to be a terrible name for a game but the game itself went really well. The objective is to get as many fish to join your shoal as possible while avoiding islands, whales (navigate by sonar) and fishing boats. The whales are the primary link to the theme as they use sonar waves to locate the fish. Check out the video below.

This year we even managed to upload the game to the Global Games Jam website here.

The big team turned out to be an excellent idea as I learnt quite a bit by trying new things I otherwise wouldn’t. A smaller team would have lead us to create a comfortable game rather than pushing boundaries.

Thanks to the Digital Greenhouse Guernsey for hosting and Kurtis Richards and Marc Beavan for organising!