Game Jam 2022

So now having completed the Game Jam 2022 I have decided to make a blog post discussing how Me & my team got on with our game.

When we first met up in a call We threw around some ideas of what type of game to make and we had quickly landed on the idea of making a language learning game as that was the requirement that the other two French students needed to meet. Their goal was to create a language learning game for secondary school students around the mark of 1st to 2nd year's. 

With the theme out of the way me & Philippa did a bit of researching around to try find the best way to make this happen. We did originally have the idea of making a 3D game where the player can run around a store collecting items into a basket but this seemed really time consuming after further research. 

There is a great program called "Crey" which allows you to do just that. It gives you an empty environment that you are free to decorate with all sorts of items to make the game however you need. This was a great tool but as I said before very time consuming so we decided to do some more research.

Not long after we had just decided to make a 2D platformer instead. We had a look at other language learning games and it seems that these types of games were quite common but none that focused on learning French in a supermarket setting.

The levels were mocked up but after a while we had landed on a similar design of just two shelves with lists of items. We wanted to keep it straight forward.

The game starts by the user clicking on the door of the shop to enter, then the user will be asked to pick up a basket. These interactions are made by creating a "Question" and highlighting the answering area. These questions also give you the change to add a "Audio" track along with them but we opted to just create our own subtitles.

The questions continue by first asking where the say "Meat" section is then follows up asking for say a turkey. When all the questions are completed there is a cashier section at the end where the user is asked in French "Cash or Card" and they have to click the correct option. We used some creative design thinking with this part as you can see the player has only cash in their wallet so there can only be one correct answer.

Overall I did enjoy doing the game jam. It was a little difficult at times as pretty much everyone had different schedules for work and such but we managed to get through it. Me & Philippa stuck to creating the game its self and the two French students were given the task of Translating all content to french and giving us the questions to add to the game its self.

Miro Board Screenshots