Boom! Boom! Castle - A gamejam game

During the days August 31st to September 12th, I participated in the CTRL ALT Gamejam (link).

I worked in a 5 people team (Equipe #03 - Alternative Control Game Makers) during these days and we created a small game called Boom! Boom! Castle.

The gamejam had the following theme: Collateral Damage and we also had to add at least one diversifier from a list and optional hidrances from another list (that would count in the final avaliation of the game, the more diversifiers/hidrances and how it was implemented would cost points, while sticking to the theme).

The prize of the gamejam is to have all publishing costs paid to publish the game on Steam (for the best game), but there are a few other categories without prizes.

Before the gamejam actually started we had to develop a short Video Pitch (link) and we would be selected by one of the Mentors that would give us mentoring during all the development of project. If your pitch was good enough to attract more than one Mentor, your team could choose between only one of them. We already had a list of mentors that we had more affinity, and Daniel Moori from WildLife was our chosen Mentor, also he was the one that we wanted to teach us from our list. How lucky of us.

We talked for many hours what kind of game we would develop, until we settled with one fun game about a Mage that was too powerfull that had to defend a castle, but he could also destroy it by doing collateral damage himself by exploding the castle if the player didn´t play with enough caution.

Boom! Boom! Castle´s Development

You can play all the games developed for CTRL ALT Gamejam right here.

Here´s the link to play Boom! Boom! Castle.

See all the Reviews of the game - link

In the first days, a member of our team got sick and had to resign from the gamejam.

I can´t really say I that like or dislike the game, but I didn´t like some decisions of the programming, so I stepped back and decided to focus on design and don't give an opinion about it anymore. Like when you work on a game inside of a game company, you don´t really need to like the game you are working on, to actually work in the game. Most of the time you won´t be working in the game that you really like. I had fun designing the characters and backgrounds (but some assets like spikes, stairs and TNT barrel never got into the game).

During one of the days, my notebook just decided to update the Windows (without any previous warning) after I pressed the button to turn it on, and I lost almost a entire day. Damn, I got a blue screen at 40% for more than 6 hours.

I used a mix of Toon Boom Harmony and Adobe Photoshop to create the characters, logo and backgrounds for the game.

We decided very early on to use very few colors to speed up the development of all assets (just Yellow, Red, Black, White and a few Gray tones). Thankfully a few of the hydrances of that list included color accessibility for the color blind and making a simplified design for the game.

The design was a mix of Cartoon characters and something akin to a HD version of a GameBoy game.

The Level Design and Pitch was made by Victor Hugo Costa, the Producer of our game.

IndieGabo was our Programmer and Game Designer.

Henrique ZSP was our Sound Designer and Music Composer.

And Daniel Moori from WildLife was our Mentor during the gamejam.

I have to thank IndieGabo for teaching us how to install and work on GitHub for hours at the start of the gamejam, such patience!

Here´s a gameplay video from Mari Abelha of our game - link

All the Mentors of the Gamejam:
Luna Dhara and Cedrik Rocha - creators of the Gamejam - Ctrl Alt
Lucas Pereira - Fanatee
Fabiano Naspolini - Youtuber/Fábrica de Jogos
Lia Fuziy - Teacher at Faculdade Meliés
Daniel Moori - WildLife
Melina Juraski - IBICT
Breno Almeida - Kokku
Gabriel Luis - Rastrolabs Game Studio

You can see the feedback of all the games in the Twitch Channel of the CTRL ALT Gamejam - link

Here´s the list of all teams:
Equipe #46 - TO COM FOME
Equipe #06 - Corvos
Equipe #40 - Psicopatos
Equipe #42 - Mundo invertido
Equipe #?? - MattBolere
Equipe #38 - Hometown
Equipe #17 - JoinStick
Equipe #32 - Hatsunai
Equipe #23 - Equipe Pague+
Equipe #22 - Time Limite
Equipe #21 - Chewbaccas
Equipe #0?? - Ramon Rodrigues (Solo)
Equipe #28 - ALT F4
Equipe #07 - EQUIPE 7
Equipe #44 - More Kaijus
Equipe #25 - A for Ally Studios
Equipe #05 - Hightground Studios
Equipe #34 - La Casa de Café
Equipe #29 - Bonanza Bros
Equipe #16 - Arcade Age
Equipe #12 - E-Keep
Equipe #19 - Pastel de Cana
Equipe #04 - Pirate Ship
Equipe #50 - Rafael Andrade
Equipe #24 - Traumas não resolvidos
Equipe #03 - Alternative Control
Equipe #48 - Chuchu Games
Equipe #09 - Rataiada
Equipe #15 - Equipe Amento
Equipe #11 - Team Eleven
Equipe #?? - etrealjunior
Equipe #35 - GamePeople
Equipe #45 - Rushers
Equipe #27 - Lendários de Aqala
Equipe #01 - Quem não deve não teme
Equipe #?? - Fabio Diorama
Equipe #31 - SEM NOME
Equipe #02 - Capivárias
Equipe #14 - TEKU
Equipe #41 - Last Minute
Equipe #37 - Michelles
Equipe #43 - Double Mind
Equipe #33 - Hollow Harpy
Equipe #30 - Vulpni Studio
Equipe #26 - Fouques
Equipe #10 - No XP
Equipe #13 - Apenas um time
Equipe #08 - Sentinela de Aço
Equipe #36 - Serious Cereal
Equipe #49 - VAMPIRE EXPERIMENT
Equipe #18 - Ambivalence studio’s

Some teams couldn´t finish their games until the deadline was over.

The Winner will be revealed in a few days.