Me and my wife took part in the 4th Wowie Game Jam. The theme of the game jam was “Collaborate With AI” which was allowed to be interpreted anyway we saw fit!

For this jam, I took charge of the programming & sourcing the music/sounds and my wife was responsible for the art, and we both collaborated together on the game design aspects.

We agreed we wanted a very simple to grasp game. My experience in other jams has been that if you make a larger/complex game, less people will give it a chance. It’s like Twitter or other media. You have about 15 seconds to appeal to someone with your game and if the first impression isn’t good, you’re not likely to keep their attention for much longer.

So we thought of a Cooking Mama/Mobile Cooking game for the overall gameplay. As these games are normally very intuitive and require little instruction to hop in and play. With the gameplay direction decided we settled with the theme of running an ice cream truck for robots. This is where the collaboration with AI takes place as we need to collaborate with them to get their orders right!

In total we spent around 15 hours on the project as we had other arrangements that weekend. Me and my wife were busy a different time. So when making the game, I used incredibly basic placeholder assets, and then instructed my wife to keep the same sizing and rough shapes so that when she could create the art, I would be able to simply drag and drop them into place. This worked a charm!

You can play the final result here : https://itsisaac.itch.io/aice-cream

We are pretty proud of what we achieved in such little time, and we also got a top ten ranking out of over 1000 entries! Even better was that it was for simplicity, which is what we had in mind from the start 🙂