Gea Of War – Global Game Jam 2023 Project

Our proposal for 2023 GGJ (with the theme “roots”) was Gea Of War, a minigame that aimed to recreate the simple and great sensation of playing a waves game in an arcade saloon while trying to get the highest score to let your print to be seen by the following players. Our way to include the yearly theme was the mechanic that let the player refill its ammo by rooting itself to earth and consume this last one’s HP in exchange. Before asking “would this not kill the game easily”? The player survives by maintaining both its life and the earth HP bar, earth recovers life when an enemy corpse touches it.

Try it online here: https://dcrespo3d.github.io/GGJ2023/build_web/gea_of_war.html

Responsabilities

  • Game System Designer: Made the incremental wave system.
    • At the start, we planned the game to have a limited number of rounds but after a couple of iterations we realized that the difficulty changes between waves felt smooth just being incremental (instead of making a curve), we redefined the game like an endless one where the players will compete for the highest score.

What could be added or improved?

Leaderboards and user records: The fact that people can take a picture of their score and pass it to their friends or post it on social media is quite fun enough by itself, so the idea of having a leaderboard that shows you the scores of other players (focusing on your friends) can add a little bit of flavour to the arcade experience that we were aiming for in the project.