Global Game Jam 2024: Pull My Finger: A Bean-Based Survival Game

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A screenshot from Pull My Finger, with overlay text that says "Pull My Finger: A Bean-Based Survival Game".


tl;dr: I participated with a friend in Global Game Jam 2024, and we made a top-down 2D game, which features a ridiculously over-the-top soundtrack, classy AI-powered voiceovers, and only a very tasteful sprinkling of gratuitous fart humor!


The jam

We participated remotely in Global Game Jam, in which we had 48 hours to create our game according to the jam's theme. We created all code, all of the music, some of the sounds, and some of the art over the course of the weekend.

The theme this time was "Make Me Laugh".

It's completely the theme's fault that we were obligated to rely on so much fart humor. Our hands were tied...

Credits

This time around, I worked with just Alden Witt!

🧑‍🎤🎸 Special thanks to Candi Carpenter for cowriting/vocals and Aaron Kessler for the blazing guitar solo!

Screenshots

An animated GIF from a recording of the game, showing many enemies following the player, and then being slowed-down by a small fart.
Your default fart.

An animated GIF from a recording of the game, showing many enemies following the player, and then being blown-back by a large fart.
A special extra-repelling fart.

An animated GIF from a recording of the game, showing many enemies following the player, and then being deterred by a large fart.
A special lingering fart.


An animated GIF of the player character.

Retrospective

  • It was fun to again work with Alden as he makes amazing sounds!
    • I was impressed with how fun the AI voice-over worked.
    • The song Alden and Candi came up with for the main sound track is so disproportionately awesome compared to the rest of the game. It's a lot of fun!
  • I didn't have any other engineering help this time, so the work-load felt similar to a solo jam.
    • Alden did all the tileset and level creation though, and that was a huge chunk of work!
  • I knew a bit more about Unreal blueprints this time around, so I felt a lot more like I could be productive, and less like I constantly needed to learn how to use the tools.
  • Making AI behaviors is so fiddly! But I already knew that. I'm just still learning all the different knobs and levers I need to know about for Unreal's flavor of AI behaviors...
    • Some of the AI still jump-around a bit unexpectedly at times.
  • We did a bit more much-needed post-jam work before sharing this one out than I usually do. The gameplay had so many bugs originally.


🎉 Cheers!


This is a simple icon representing my sabbatical.

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