Making Jelly Chasers! (1/2)

To kick off our second year we were given a brief about sweets. I'm good at them, so naturally had this one down. The brief outlined that you have to market the popular 'Jelly Babies' sweets with a game that appeals to 8 - 12 y/o.

We assembled our team and came up with a studio name that would win the hearts of all serious business people:

Eat your heart out disney

Our tutors rightly suggested this was perhaps not an appropriate team name/logo.

'No Hesitation, No Surrender'

Once we had a bit of a giggle we were ready to stop playing silly buggers and do some work. This brief was focused more on the paperwork side of game design, so you had to make a prototype level from your game idea (barely playable) and then write a GDD, TDD, ADD and Personal Journal for it. Here's a few screenshots of our prototype:

Start Screen

From player's perspective

 Inspiration for our game's mechanics came from the masterpiece that is KATAMARI. In Katamari you roll around a pile of junk, making it bigger and bigger. In our game, you run around as a Jelly baby, picking up smaller ones to grow larger. As you grow bigger, you can access more of the level.

View from above

On that concept, we made a picnic table. To climb the cake and other puzzles you'd have to be a certain size. The level has a timer to put the player under pressure when absorbing the other jelly babies and there were lots of fun little interact able points. Jesse Schell says you have to make 20 games before you start to make progress. Thank god we're on bloody number 2. ONWARD..