Jan 26th - 28th saw the 10th Global Game Jam with over 42k people taking part globally. Guernsey took part in its 4th jam, hosted once again at the Digital Greenhouse 6 teams (17 people) working on different games.

Jase and I were keen to work on a game together and were joined by 3 others. Our team this year…

  • Myself
  • Jase Magee
  • Charles Christian
  • George Bott
  • Owain Catton

Owain brought the artistic flair to the team, with the remaining 4 of us developers.

The theme for this year was …

‘Transmission’

Unlike last year’s theme (Waves) we found this theme resonated well with the group and we came up with lots of ideas. We settled on a conquest game called VIRUS OUTBREAK.

Alright, picture this: you’re in the midst of a cyber world, and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to fill up and take over the whole darn host network. How do you do it? You send your virus cells hopping from node to node, outpacing the other virus cells that are trying to pull the same stunt. It’s a bit like a cyber version of king of the hill.

So, how do you move those virus cells? Easy peasy. You just pick a node you’ve already nabbed, give a tap to any connected nodes, and off your virus cell goes. Need to send more? Just tap that node again. Rinse and repeat. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll feel like a digital puppet master. Some folks find it a bit head-scratching at first play, but once they’ve sussed out the controls then it’s hard to put down.

Now, we’ve gotta admit, we’re pretty chuffed with how the game turned out. We had initially thought of going turn-based, but late Friday night (or was it Saturday morning?), it morphed into a real-time strategy game which made things a whole lot simpler and way more exciting.

We had an absolute blast fiddling with the code, especially the bit that randomly generates networks and the one that tidies them up into a neat layout. The AI code evolve from a monster of complexity into something that by the end was sleek and simple!

We’re tidying things up a bit before releasing it on itch.io, but if you’re itching (pun intended) to get a taste of the action, check out the game here