TOJAM13 and Pink Slip Racers
The Jamhammer team embarked on a 3 day journey into rapid game development. At first we were weary, but we prevailed with time to spare. TOJAM is a 3 day game jam that takes place in the awesome George Brown College campus in downtown Toronto. The theme this year was winning is for losers. It took us a while, but we ended up going with a free for all couch co-op racing-esque game named Pink Slip Racers.
I think the game speaks for itself, so check it out for all it’s insanely broken-ness. Look for more details about this game after we launch Shwip, we have a few surprises up our sleeves!
Shwip Updates
Work on Shwip is chugging along. We implemented Keyboard/Mouse controls this month. The Unity input manager as it currently works is… interesting. There are several awesome looking asset store packages for input management, but we decided to roll with our own for the time being. We usually opt for custom-home grown solutions over the turnkey packages.
Revamping Style mode
After the CNE in August of 2017, we decided to revamp one of our key modes – Style. Originally, this mode offered players more challenging enemies and an upgrade system. The jist was that if you used combos of weapons, boost and ship abilities, you would be given style points to purchase upgrades for your ship. In turn, each level you gained meant an increase in enemy difficulty. While we understood it, we quickly understood that explaining the mode to others was too complicated in that short of time. Since we are going with a simple, pick up and play game with Shwip, it went against the nature of the game AND it was too similar to Arcade without offering much of a difference in gameplay and enemy behaviour – ultimately, players were confused.
Stay tuned next time for a more in-indepth look into Style mode.
