Digging Deep and Learning Fast: Our First Game Jam

Figured, I could write something short to keep y'all in the loop!

Let's talk about our experience at Jame Gam #15! This was Casuology's first time participating as a company. The theme was Together, and we had to incorporate a shovel as a special object. We only found out about the jam two hours before it started, but we dove in headfirst anyway.

Over the course of two days, we created Banana Bonez. The game is about leading a team of monkey paleontologists to the center of the Earth (that's 3000 km, y'all!) to dig up precious bones, clean them, assess their value, and sell them. The only problem is, there are skeletons that try to stop you! So, you gotta upgrade your team's efficiency and defense to dig deeper and find even more valuable artifacts.

Of course, in any game jam, you have to cut some features. We wanted to have different types of enemies and weapons to protect the research base, but we ran out of time. We also couldn't add sound design or balance the game properly. But hey, we still managed to rank #17 out of 77 entries, which is not bad at all.

We got a lot of support and feedback, which confirmed our assumed points of growth. Next time, we'll make sure to allocate time to create a tutorial inside the game. Overall, everyone seemed eager to try each other's games, and we're no exception! A very energetic environment to be part of, highly recommend it to those who need to regain passion.

Creating Banana Bonez was so much fun. Personally, I loved drawing adorable monkey paleontologists. We're already looking forward to participating in more game jams in the future. Who knows what kind of wacky games we'll come up with next?