Introduction
It started when I surprised a friend, a software engineer for a big tech company in Silicon Valley, with tickets to participate in a Game Jam. He'd always talked about wanting to make video games, and I thought it would be a great way for us to learn how to make a game in a weekend. We recruited 2 other friends who also loved video games, and thus Tag Team Games was born during Global Game Jam 2014.
When we first started, none of us were working in the video game industry; we simply loved playing them, and had entertained the idea of creating our own for awhile. We've applied agile methodologies and other practices we learned in our profession, to these short game making sprints.
Since then, two of us have graduated from working on games as a hobby, to making games as a profession.
Below you will find a selection of my personal favorites that we've worked on in the last 6 years of taking part in game jams. You can see all the games we've made here.
Space Bunny Battle Arena
We created this game with the restriction of having only one button be the control. After some brainstorming, we all decided that a multiplayer battle arena game would work the best. The goal of this game is to shoot rainbow laser beams at other players, which both propelled the player and can damage other players. I created all the art for this game.
A sprite sheet of all the bunnies I created for the programmers to animate into a playable character.
Drive With Your Friend
The theme for this particular game jam was, "Transmission." We decided to take it down the vehicular route, and were inspired by "You Don't Know Jack," a game that is hosted on a console or PC wherein players can join and play with their smartphones. After some brainstorming, we decided to work on this concept of a cooperative, cross-device, multiplayer game. The game itself is displayed on a host PC, and players each operate a different part of the car as a controller: The steering wheel, clutch, stick shift, and gas.
This project was created in about 36 hours and this was the outcome. I created all the art assets for this game and was the lead designer for the gameplay.
You can view and play this game here (requires a PC and 4 Android devices).