The Jam’s theme was “games that make you laugh”. We sought to achieve this by taking inspiration from funny party games such as Gang Beasts and Overcooked and games with absurd and goofy controls and physics like QWOP. I acted as technical designer, bug and quality assurance tester and voice actor. The game was made on a team of four within 2 days.

The major challenge was finding the right balance between exaggeration and ease of use for our control scheme, as to make sure the experience was closer to comedic and not frustrating.

Our idea was that comedy in games can be achieved via micro-interactions between multiple players where both entities observe some form of absurdity. The absurdity in this case being both the ridiculous narrative scenario of a housecat and Roomba joining forces to defeat an onslaught of “Dust Rats” and the overexaggerated physics designed in the cooperative controls. Even the naming is a pun, the term dust bunny translates roughly to dust rat in Swedish.