This years 48h Global Game Jam theme was “Repair” so our team put together and idea to make a World War Z style zombie survival Tower Defence game, where the player would have to fight off hoards of fast moving zombies that pile up on the walls, by creating and upgrading offensive weapons while repairing their base as long as they can…
This was the first time I had participated in a game jam and had never participated in game design at all. Lucky for me, I was invited to join a team of professional game designers from Estoty. They are a company that creates top-selling casual mobile games and the team wanted to try their hands on a bigger scale project using a new technology - ECT DOTS, that allows to work with massive amounts of entities.
The plan turned out way too ambitious for the scope of 48h and we learnt that ECS is not quite ready for a project like this. It is soon to be implemented into Unity, so we will see how it developes in the future.
Overall, this was a fantastic experience and allowed me to meet many artists, developers and game designers that I normally wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to in my daily job. I think I also was able to break a lot of misconceptions about SketchUp in our game design community, showing how versatile of a tool SketchUp can be.