Rain Dance was a game I helped lead during the 2016 Global Game Jam. While Game Jam is never intended as a competition, in Savannah, Georgia it absolutely is, with the Savannah College of Art and Design awarding positions (for bragging rights of course) to the games that they felt were best. Our game was runner up at the competition.

 

Rain Dance is a four player asymmetrical party game, where one player controls a witch doctor who runs around trying to grow crops for his village, and three players run around as goats with different powers trying to eat and destroy the crops. Every round the players rotate their character and at the end of four rounds a winner is determined based on overall points.

 

I was lucky enough to work with an extremely talented team for this short period, and as you can see much of our visual style is defined by the artwork of sequential artist Matthew Gallman  whose work is shown below. We took his work and were able to create a material transition system that would grow the crops dynamically within a certain radius of the witch doctor. We also created all of the particle effects using only his two dimensional images (I particularly love the way the fire-belch effect turned out). 

 

On top of challenging ourselves with a unique 2D/3D hybrid art style and building a balanced splitscreen game in 48 hours, we wanted to use some of this year's diversifiers. We went with A Bard's Tale, paying homage to Shakespeare with our strange take on The Tempest (it's about a sorcerer on an island who summons a storm, but there are no goats); Multijammer, where we worked with another Game Jam site; Loudmouth, where all of our fantastic sound effects were created only by our sound designer, Chanel van Eeden's mouth and finally Common Ground, in which players of drastically different ability levels can compete!

 

The experience was very rewarding, and you can check out the website for our game here. 

 

Additionally Rain Dance has been honored by being a part of the Indie Bits Independent Games Festival in South Carolina, and you can check out our page on that site here.

 

Also if you'd like to play the game, you can check it out here on our Global Game Jam page. Download is Windows only, and to play you'll need four Xbox style controllers and probably a couple friends. Enjoy!