O—>

O—> is the game I made together with Michael Hussinger at the Global Game Jam Berlin 2014.  I used Löve2D, which has recently been ported to Android, which let me port the game to that platform too.

The theme of the Global Game Jam was “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”.  Our game simulates a battle between two factions: the yellow army and the green army.  The player controls an orb that floats around the battlefield.  Wherever the sight of the orb is directed, the battle is affected by growing or shrinking the watched soldier so that it has the same size as the orb, which can affect the outcome positively or negatively depending on the relative size of the other soldier engaged in battle.

The goal of the game is to tip the balance in favour of the yellow team.

On the desktop version, the orb is controlled with the cursor keys and the sight with the mouse.  You can exit the game by pressing ESC, and switch between fullscreen and windowed with ALT+RETURN.  On the mobile version, the orb can be dragged with the finger, and tapping on the battlefield directs the sight, using multi-touch.

The Global Game Jam 2014 was a great experience.  60 jammers participated, 17 games were made, all in the Wooga office in Berlin.  I’m definitely looking forward to organizing the next edition again in 2015.

The song is a rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “The Thunderer” march, by Free Tim, licensed under a Public Domain license.  The name of the game (which is an ascii-art representation of the player’s orb and the “sight laser”) is pronounced “o dash dash dash greater than”.

• Download the game ( Linux, Windows, Mac, Android )
• Project page at Global Game Jam website
• Source code repository
• Download from Google Play (Android)

In case you’re interested, here’s the video of the presentation I gave at the jam:

Update 28 March 2014:

I uploaded the game to Google Play, so that you can download it directly to your phone.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lairofpixies.odash

Note:  If you look at the download size, it’s quite big for an Android game (24Mb).  It’s not Löve2D’s fault.  It’s the images, we put a lot of high-resolution images in there, so that it looks good even in the highest-resolution tablets (Nexus 10 and such).  The assets (images + music) weight 19Mb on their own.  I know it’s a lot, but this is just a jam-game after all, you play it a bit and that’s it, that’s why we didn’t put any effort in reducing the download size.  Sorry if this is an inconvenience.

Also, a trailer: