Kaboom-aconda

An arcade snake-with-turrets game for GMTK Game Jam 2024.

Game jam theme

Built to scale

Behind the scenes

Same as last game jam, I wanted to join up with cool new people, so I tried GMTK's team finder. Initially I found mostly programmers, and was almost getting worried if we'd find artists to team up with... and then a group of 7 (at the time) artists posted that they're looking for devs! 🤩 There was one potential issue though... they are in America, and the rest of us are in Europe. But they seemed very nice and excited, and it was a fun opportunity to try working with someone in a very different time zone, so we went with it!

We did brainstorm ideas, but once a snake with turrets in space was mentioned, we knew what we'll be doing. Everyone got excited about it and had cool ideas to expand it, or stuff that they wanted to do within that idea!

After that we started with the actual development. Our approach was: devs work in european time, artists in american time, and we'd do two big syncs per day to align the teams. It was different from working with all the people at the same time, but it was still super fun and the mood was great!

My role

Code. 😄 And some visualizations.

I made the snake. I tried 7 different ways to make it, and they were all imperfect (bad), but it was fun to try approaches. I probably had 5 other ideas, but had to move on to other things.

The other big-ish thing I did and enjoyed was the transition between the different "scale levels". There's always something fun and challenging when doing a transition of sorts - to make it feel reasonably nice.

The team

Art Director/Producer
Jarred Lima

Art Director
Michelle Ng

Game Artists
Min Sik Kim
Young-Tek
Weslie Alberty
Dalila Dutpayeva
Sebastian Ongko
Annie Ramey

Animator
Min Sik Kim
Dalila Dutpayeva

Storyboard Artist
Annie Ramey

Music
Barbedor Musique

Programmers
Yasen Dokov
Roman Malyshev
Liam CC
Rogneda Norman
Robert Norman