Global Game Jam 2017: Our game "Speaker Rumble"

Global Game Jam ran a couple weeks ago, and this year I was able to participate. The jam's theme was "Waves".

Teaming up with Chris Sotiropoulos, we made this little game:

Speaker Rumble is a game where you control a speaker-like robot thrown into a junkyard and attacked by hostile robots, and you have to fight your way out using your blasting soundwaves.

I've been on game jams before, but GGJ was a new experience for me for 2 reasons:

• All my previous jams were online, so I didn't actually get to meet the other participants.
• I have always participated solo (as opposed to having to cooperate).

Not having any available colleagues of my own, I looked for people to team up with and met Chris. We came up with this simple concept, made a quick draft on paper and started working on it.

Regarding the game's development, I was quite pleased with how everything went:

• The initial draft barely needed changes, and we pretty much stayed on what we had planned. 
• The graphics came out good-looking and style-consistent. Keeping them simple helped a lot with deadlines without making the game look badly designed.
• While a two-member team did not allow us to assign strict roles, the cooperation went smoothly and we retained a good team spirit.
• The gameplay was satisfying, and we had time to implement a two-player mode in addition to the single-player.

One of the things we had to forfeit from the initial plan was the final Boss Fight. Time limitations restricted us from completing this part, but I was keen on finishing it after the jam. Now I finally had time to do that, so it's ready and the latest version now includes the Boss fight.

Feel free to check out the game:

• Gamejolt page (Windows/Mac/Linux download)
• GGJ game page (old version, Windows only)

Special thanks to Chris, the GGJ Athens volunteers, and the other jammers for making this a great experience. Hope to see you guys again in more jams.

-Kostas