Here’s another game jam update and postmortem from the MultiMediaVerse team. The jam: Just Play Jam: A Game Jam For Justice. As you can see from the details of this game jam, there were higher stakes than any I’ve ever participated in. Our biggest hurdle was coming into the jam about a week and a half late because I didn’t hear about it until then. Nevertheless, I feel great about the outcome of the jam!

Play Tio Omitli now!

This was the first game jam my sister (Susie) and I participated in together. This was her first completed game project, so congrats Susie! I worked on the usual: code, art, audio, game design, and dialogue/narrative design. Susie helped with around half of the narrative design. We used Unity with the Dialogue System by a friend of mine, Tony Li. I couldn’t have done this game without Tony’s hard work to build such a great system. If you’re a game developer, I strongly recommend using it for your Unity games, too.

Just Play Game Jam for Justice

The theme of this game jam was “justice” with additional sub-themes. I won’t list them all, but we approached the project with the following in mind: justice, narrative, community, social impact, spirituality, and post-colonial. The rules were fairly standard for game jams, the most common being to use new assets/works. Existing games were excluded from the main competition.

It got me excited to find out this jam was all about justice, narrative, and community. My primary project Over Many Waters (OMW) is mostly a seafaring RPG, but strong elements of community building will persist throughout the game. Approaching the game jam, I wanted to create a sort of spin-off to OMW so that I could recycle most or all of the assets created for Tio Omitli back into OMW.

You can read more about Tio Omitli’s intentions, gameplay, and design on the game’s Itch.io page.

Success Story

This was my best and favorite game jam project. I hope the world feels the same way. Regardless, I feel almost everything went according to plan. Using draw.io’s workflow diagram as a collab and idea board, we scoped out the project and followed a daily plan. With our Discord channel, we shared updates, files, WIPs, and ideas. We did have another member on the team when we started, but that individual became overwhelmed with previous commitments and dropped out. I was a little upset, since they participated in some of the meetings, but contributed zero. 

Anyway, that's about all I have for you today. The project went well. I’m happy with it. Everything you need to know about Tio Omitli and the game jam is right here on the itch page. Go check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks!