Wizards of the Finger

On February 2014 I attended the Nordic Game Jam in Copenhagen. It’s the biggest game jam I’ve been to, there were around 500 people participating. The jam started with several presentations about different topics related to games, and the first day evening we started with the proper jam: pitching ideas for games and forming teams.

I teamed up with Thomas and Thorsten, who came from Hamburg to participate. They were advertising themselves during the pitching phase by projecting a pic of the “forever alone” meme face to the wall of the cafeteria.

The jam was divided in five paths: boardgames, music games, mobile, single player and multiplayer (if I remember correctly). We decided to make a game for the “mobile” path, focusing on touch controls, and we wanted it to be local multiplayer. The theme of the jam was “privacy”. The way we used the theme was to inform the game mechanics: the game tries to make the hands of the two players hit each other by accident, while giving them a better score the more far apart they are.

It’s a collaborative game, the goal is to reach the highest score by protecting your partner. The game is available on the Google Play market, and was made with Löve2D. Thorsten made the graphics and composed the music himself, Thomas was in charge of game design and user testing (there were a lot of users available for that 😉 ), and myself took up the coding duties.