Dust Up Team Up
The Dust Bunnies have become Dust Rats! Fend off the onslaught as the Cat and his trusty Roomba steed! The Cat shoots the rats to make them shrink enough for the Roomba to vacuum them up! Survive as long as you can!
My team’s submission for the 2024 Global Game Jam in Skovde, Sweden, made in 2 days! The theme was “Make Me Laugh”. Our design approach to this challenge was to use both the game’s concept and mechanics to instill comedy. Specifically in the absurdity of a cat and Roomba joining forces to defeat unending swarms of dust particle vermin and forcing the players to cooperate through purposefully wobbly controls.
One of the challenges we faced was making sure there controls were just awkward enough to be fun and humorous without crossing over to being frustrating. This was compounded with the cooperative aspect, as we had to make the separate tasks of turning and moving the Roomba not too conflicting with the difficulty of aiming and firing the “spray bottle” to fire at the mice, otherwise it wouldn’t be fun for either party. Thankfully, our public testing proved that this wasn’t the case and we had a lot of fun watching players work together.
