kid kraken

one of my favorite youtubers in the game dev space, Juniper Dev, announced a very serious game jam soon after my friends and i created hyper turnip. we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to get together and see what we were capable of.

after getting the theme, spin to win, we spent the first 36 hours on deciding the direction of our game. i grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down as many words that related to this theme as i could. as we pitched many ideas to each other (a platformer that takes place in a slot machine, a narrative story of a serious business man working at a propeller hat factory, a mystery story of a village that exists on the face of a clock), one word kept sticking out: whirlpools.

during one of our meetings, it struck me. "what if we were a tiny kraken that spun whirlpools to sink enemy ships?" from there, our creativity went rampant, and now exists in what you can play today!

as a team of three, we split the project largely into three categories: art, design, and development. while we all pitched in on every part where needed, i was the developer of the team.

my main focus was on the project architecture, feature implementation, level creation, game balancing, and general development. it was fascinating to get a deeper understanding of Godot as an engine (game states, custom nodes, scene hierarchy, sprite animations, global scripts, level creation, pathfinding, etc).

occasionally, as i was developing a new mechanic, i would think of new ways to improve the design and pitch it to our game designer.

i still cannot believe how much we got done in just one week. i am so incredibly proud of us, and i cannot wait to continue working together as a team of passionate game developer hobbyists.

there are many things we still want to add to this project. it is unpolished, not quite balanced, and there are many mechanics we did not have time to add. nonetheless, we decided to cease development and keep this as our messy, beautiful little game jam creation.