Global Game Jam 2017 - Her Resonance

The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is an annual game creation event taking place worldwide in different physical locations. At certain time, a theme is announced and jammers have 48 hours to make a game based on it. Thousands of people participate all around the world, creating thousands of games (more than 7000 games have been created in the 2017 edition) and the number increases every year.

IGGI signs up every year as one of the GGJ local sites, taking place in one of the collaborating institutions so, as part of the programme, I spent the weekend in York making a game.

The theme, Waves, was announced at 6pm on Friday 20th and the brainstorming started. My team of three agreed on the game surprisely quickly and, althought we were missing an artist, we managed to create something decent by Sunday.

We wanted to make an original 2D game where the player would experience different emotions. The concept for Her Resonance was born: The game would be about a girl who sees herself as a wave and go through the journey of her life, having different experiences when bumping into other waves (people). Girl’s mood would be reflected on her assigned frequency and it would change by resonance depending on the frequency of the waves she interacts with. The idea was having different states where the music and environment would change, depending on her mood.

At the end, a poetry puzzle platformer was created. The game is formed by 5 different states in the girl’s life: loneliness, exploration, calm, disturbance and acceptance. Each of the states are introduced to the player with a poem, presenting the story of the girl and the objective that should be reached to advance to the following state. As there were no artist in the team it was not possible to achieve exactly the environmental experience we were looking for. However, overall, a first version of the game was created; being possible to experience the journey with the full poetry in place, some background color updates and a beautiful soundtrack, so we were really happy with the results achieved.

At the York GGJ site, some prizes for different categories were given and our game, Her Resonance won the prize for Best writing/storytelling and an Honourable Mention for audio!

Her Resonance was uploaded to the Global Game Jam site so the code and the executables for Windows and OSX can be found in there; try it out!