Tall Order
You gotta have a spinning model to show off your 3d-graphics!
Summary
You may be several hundred meters tall, but you barely made it through omnipotent tower school. With the power to release waves of destruction and joy, you have skirted along for millennia. Recognizing your power, a peasant comes to you for help, but his language is foreign. Use your deductive skills to answer his call, and you will be rewarded and admired by his people. Hint: there is only one puzzle.
Gameplay
The player is the tower, villagers accost you for favours during times of need and it is up to you to determine the language they're using to address those needs. Due to time constraints, the puzzles weren't fully formed but the idea was to create a number of pattern recognition problems that the player would have to understand and answer to complete the request.
Solving the problem either yielded happy and loyal followers or a catastrophic event punishing the villagers for their desperation. Examples that made it into the game were floods and waves of locusts(full screen, of course because that's fun).
Objectives
The theme of the game jam was Waves and I think that we manifested the theme in the reward/punishment system of the game. Waves of joy/pain and how a minor miscommunication between two parties can very quickly flip one to the other.
Unfortunately, the 10 puzzles that we wanted to include in the game were difficult to think of after two days of poor sleep and lots of travel to the UBC campus. We ended up shipping with 3 that showcase the punishments, which were the fun part of the game.
Take-aways
At the time, I had very little familiarity with Unity and this was likely the first time I had experimented with it beyond basic prototypes for platformers/strategy games. Given my limited experience, my partner was completely unable to perform design duties within the engine so much of my time was spent iterating on elements and testing visuals as they were being completed to ensure that they worked. I learned a lot about the importance of spreading work out during this jam and limiting production bottlenecks. Having more time to actually code game elements would have been beneficial to the end product.