So far my husband and I have made two games. Our first and longest joint side project is Scales:A Pangolin Story and our second, Maisy and Kevin.
Scales
We made a game! This has been one of the most fun and rewarding projects I have ever worked on. My husband has wanted to make a game for ages but needed someone to take care of the design side of things. He married the right woman because I love messing around with animation and jumped at the chance of creating sprites, backgrounds and scenery for this game.
From conception to finished product we collaborated on every part, from finalising the story line to critiquing each others work. We both learnt so much. Oliver has never coded a game before and I have never animated for one before so it was really cool to finally finish this and have friends and family play it!
Here is the link... go check it out:
Maisy and Kevin
Oliver asked me one day if I fancied doing a 'game jam' with him. I had no idea what a game jam was but quickly learnt. At the start of a game jam, you get a brief and 24 or 48 hours to complete a game in a team with other developers and designers.
Because we had full-time jobs Oliver found a slightly longer jam, a 5-day one so we could work in our evenings. However, that particular week turned out to be a really busy one and I was struggling with pregnancy fatigue it turns out we only spend around 3 evenings on this game.
We found out at the start of the week that the theme of the jam was anxiety in autistic people. I went straight to the drawing board and pitched an idea to Oliver based on a tortoise and his carer a ladybird. We did some research on particular struggles related to autism and wrote a simple storyline to fit our little characters.
Because we had not long since finished Scales we had learnt a lot and this game came really easily. Oliver did set himself a challenge by making a point-and-click game, we hadn't done that before, but it went really well. I decided to keep the designs really paired back and simple. I love how Maisy and Kevin had such similar silhouettes and tried to continue this design trend with other characters and objects in the game.
I could write about our processes and ideas behind this game and Scales for ages, yeah if you have any interest in finding out more then we would be happy to talk to you about it!
to cut a long story short our game went up against 22 other games in the jam... and you'll never guess what- we won!!
It's short and sweet with lots of heart and in a gentle way introduces people to the struggles of autistic people navigating this confusing and often overwhelming world.
Play it here:
A Little Scared
'a little scared' is a stealth platformer created in just a couple of spare moments over the month of November by husband and wife game dev duo as part of the Github Jam 2021.
The theme was 'Bug' ... we took it very literally!
Life as a bug is fragile. Lottie took one too many lives of innocent ants and is now paying the penalty. Bitten by a small but deadly moth, she has shrunk to a size smaller than an ant. Test your skills of logic and speed in this stealth platformer to navigate this massive land and it's huge inhabitants. The bugs are out for revenge!
* Ran out of time to properly polish but we hope you enjoy playing!