Crab Jousting
Every semester, Sheridan College hosts a 5-day game jam called Design Week. This time, the constraint was AltCtrl. We had to build games with creative and unusual controllers that elevate gameplay through their physicality. My team made a PvP game where the players use kitchen tongs as crab claws to move and attack!
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Project info
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Roles: Game Designer, Artist
Team Size: 5
Duration: 5 days
Engine: Unity
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Ideation
The team's brainstorming happened in stages. First we individually noted down ideas, themes and objects that could make for fun designs. Then we broke into mini groups of 2 and 3, building upon each other's pitches and narrowing down to the ones that had the most potential. We repeated this process with the whole team.
The Bottle Flipping and the Sound/Sight games had similar idea evolutions with team members riffing on each other's ideas
A critical moment during early development was convincing the rest of the team, the potential of our idea. I made a quick animation to show how naturally the tongs mapped on to the claws.
Above are sketches from the team's lead programmer. These mechanics built a solid gameplay foundation that complemented our controller-object pairing. The movement was inspired by Getting Over It Bennett Foddy.
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Conception
The sketches and the animation fully sold the idea to the team. I assumed the lead art role and began translating ideas into polished visuals. Below is an example exploring the art style. Note the emphasis on the dominant claw.
Programmer Sketch
''Does it have to be a crab claw?''
''Can it be a little robot?''
''Why not a bird?''
''Does the 'claw' really need to be separated from the body?''
The controller was made using ordinary kitchen tongs. A Nintendo joycon was attached to it's side and was used to calculate rotations using it's gyroscope through a makey-makey. Aluminum foil was used the register the claw snaps.
Ready screen
The Fantasy - Quick 2D animation using stock images to communicate the intended feel of the game
Photo from design week