During the Student Game Developer Alliance‘s 2022 Summer Game Jam, I worked on the game design and narrative design of Carni-Ball, a relatively simple little sports-based party game.
The game was developed in one week, using the two themes ‘Game Over Is Not The End’ and ‘Party Games’. We settled on this multi-player sports game, where getting “out” allows players to interact with the game in a different way.
As a team, we settled on making this horror-themed, and it was then down to me to design a reason and a world around this “second life” mechanic. I ended up designing a spirit olympics in the underworld, named the characters the artist drew and created backstories for them, and finally came up with the name ‘Carni-Ball’. All copy inside the game and in the Itch description was also written by me.
While not the most complex game in the world, it was a lot of fun to design a simple story around a mechanic, and good to briefly work with a team again!
You can play the game on my team mate’s itch.io page here: