Global Game Jam 2018 - Pass my Pants (aka Pants Mission)

The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is an annual game creation event taking place worldwide in different physical locations. Jammers have 48 hours to make a game based on a certain theme. This year it was transmission.

Last year I used Unity to develop a poetry puzzle platformer and, even when it was pretty chilled because my team took the decision to enjoy the experience, I had in mind doing something different this time; preferably avoiding the pain of setting up complicated environments and tools.

At the beginning of the jam I was thinking on using another game development framework (I’ve been willing to try Love2D for a while), but I was not really sure about what to do exactly. On Friday, talking with one of my colleagues from IGGI, he told me his team was going to do a card game. I had never been involved in the design of a card game before, but I really liked the sound of the idea and I joined them.

As expected, the process is quite different than when developing a digital game; and I really enjoyed it! The idea was using transmission as a mechanic of a collaborative game; where players would transmit ideas in order to play a certain card, without talking to each other.

It was a tricky concept, and not easy to make it work as, specially at the beginning, we had a feeling of randomness in the gameplay. After iterating the game several times; trying different variants and playtesting each of the crazy ideas we were having; we came up with something that seemed to work. We got some volunteers to test the game and their feedback helped us polishing its final version.

Once the mechanics were ready, it was necessary to choose a theme for the game, which was not much easier task than the previous one. After some deliberation, Pass my Pants was born!

Pants card example

Next step was designing the cards. We had to decide their style; having to choose between a handcraft or digital process. We ended up mixing both: Jen draw and coloured the clothes manually; while I created the templates digitally (in order to easily produce different cards with the same background style). We scanned the pictures and included them in the templates, having as a result cards looking similar to the picture on the right. They look pretty cool!

We had 4 categories of clothes (pants, bottoms, tops and accesories), and we needed 12 different items in each of the categories; which means designing 48 different cards… in a couple of hours! Obviously, it was going to be quite difficult to get all the different designs done before the Game Jam ended. Althought we listed all the different clothes we would include in the game; we aimed to, at least, have ready one item of each category; to be able to print a playable first version of the game.

We also needed to have the rules written up. So we splitted up the work: Jen and I (with Joe helping digitalising the clothes) took care of the design and creation of the cards; while David and Joe focused on writing up the rules and the final playtesting, making sure that people understand easily how to play. We managed to organise ourselves quite well and by 5pm (when the Game Jam finished) we had 17 cards and the rules ready and checked; so we reached our goal!

I am not going to get into detail about the rules here; as the game is online at the Global Game Jam site (Pass my Pants), where you can check them. You can even download the cards we created and play the game with your favourite clothes. It was a fun weekend and I really think we managed to create a cool game in a very short time, so check it out!