The Japanese Gods of Tsunami are twins. They are always arguing about who is the best tsunami god, so they do this competition all the time --- try to blow the other out with the waves they created.
This game was made be Song Ye, Lea Liu, Emma Wang and me at GGJ2017. I was responsible for game design, interaction design and sound design.
Jan 2017
Process
This project was created at the Global Game Jam 2017. The theme of this year's GGJ was "Waves". What kind of wave is fun? That was the first question in our mind. And we immediately thought of this rope wave game that we all somehow played.
Rope wave game
The trick of a game jam is when you have a fun idea, you go all the way with it without thinking of other stuff because you only have this little time and you want it to be spent on making the game as much as possible. So we went with this initial thought and make it the main mechanic.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
For some reason, we came up with the famous Japanese painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and the Japanese art style was loved in our group, so I wrote this story based on the Japanese myth, Lea and Emma made the visual contents accordingly.
Cover Art
The design of the Twins of Wind
Story: Long long time ago in ancient Japan, there are two God of Wind taking charge of the wind on the sea, they are the Twins of Wind. They are twins but they do not get along well because both of them think they are stronger than his twin. So they always have this fight: control the winds to make waves against each other until one is pushed out of a certain range. And that is the game we are making.
The wave effect by algorithm
Instructions
We encountered some obstacles on the way of making our idea playable. One major obstacle we managed to overcome was to write the algorithm to calculate the shape of the wave realtime and display it with the water material and add splash on the peak of the wave. Our programmer Song was very talented and open-minded, he and I discussed and came out the easiest way of doing this eventually.
People playing our game at the end of the jam
I learned a lot from this event taking the role of kinda product manager in our group, meaning follow up everyone's work and do the work no one is working on. Because other members of our team all have a very focused skillset, like programmer and game artist, and I have a wide-range of skills so I was able to sub in as the game designer, co-programmer, sound designer and product manager, which was really fun and I enjoyed this role a lot.