Global Game Jam 2014 – Selfie : The Videogame

I’m in the comedown phase of the Global Game Jam, Glasgow leg.

For those not lucky enough to have a lifestyle which allows them to work on their own projects full time, it’s easy to become cynical about developing games.

For this reason, the institution of ‘Game Jamming’ has never been more important. At a time where the soulless indifference of the ‘business’ of games is in the spotlight, we find a fortress where passionate developers get to be just that. Developers.

You only need to look at the number of entries with ‘Candy’ in their title to gauge just how strong the feeling is on this subject.

Candy Panda Saga

Anyway, the theme this year was a sentence…

“We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are”

A challenging theme, to say the very least!

We drew from this the notion of people who see themselves as the centre of their world, where everything else, no matter how beautiful, dangerous or emotionally challenging, was not really important. The kind of people who take ‘Selfies’.

The concept was inspired by the website ‘Selfies at Funerals‘, a website which showcases people taking photos of themselves at perhaps the most inappropriate of times (And which actually shut down when David Cameron and Obama took a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s Funeral). The gameplay is inspired by the photography minigame from ‘Dead Rising’, and the style by ‘Proteus’ and ‘Katamari’.

The world is ending, there is chaos all around, yet your objective is to take selfies. You get bonus points for taking them in front of rare and interesting things, and even more bonus points for variety (Everything has a category). So… Elvis Presley standing in front of a Stonehenge monument with a UFO flying overhead would score big!

The main character is a photorealistic image, but the background is deliberately simplistic and inconsistent. This was to symbolise that the character is the only ‘Real’ thing in their world. There is all this remarkable stuff happening all around them, yet half the view is obscured by their face.

The game got a great reaction, and everyone who played it left with a smile on their face. I’d definitely say this is the most fun I’ve ever had at a game jam. So… same time next year!

You can download and play the game from the ‘Global Game Jam’ page here : Link