Jared Nolen
Programmer • Developer • Game Designer • QA Tester
The Great Tut Migration
Four Person Team | GMTK Game Jam 2021
June 2021
The Great Tut Migration: An Interactive Nature Documentary. Is a game where you are the leader of a flock of Tuts. A flightless and rather unintelligent species of bird. As the head of the flock, the Tuts will follow your movements and commands. Lead the flocks across the desert to the oasis on the other end. How many can you save?
On Itch.io here!
On GitHub here!
Responsibilities:
This was a team project for the Game Maker's Toolkit game jam 2021, a weekend-long game jam. My responsibilities included:
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Gameplay Design and Ideation
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Player controls and movement
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Level design
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Level art
Recognition:
Placed #231 out of 5,700+ game submissions via community voting.
In collaboration with:
Danielle Kraljevski: Art
Keenan Rea: Programming
Nathann Latimore: Programming, Voice Acting
Tools / Languages Used:
Phaser, Javascript, HTML, VS Code, GitHub, Aseprite, Tiled
Design Process:
This project was made for the Game Maker's Toolkit game jam 2021. This is one of the largest online annual game jams with over 5,700 submitted games! The theme this time was 'Joined Together'. After the theme was announced I met up with my team and we started to brainstorm. Eventually, we came up with the following idea.
Narrative: "A nature documentary focusing on a group of small flightless birds attempting to cross a desert to the next oasis where they will find water"
Mechanics: You play as the lead bird and you have a heard that follows you. You must avoid hazards by re-arranging your flock. Make it to the oasis with as many birds remaining as possible.
The jam was weekend-long so we got to work. First, we worked on the basic game mechanics such as player control and gathering your flock. We added the ability to re-arrange and rotate your flock to avoid obstacles. Once the mechanics all worked we started adding visual elements and level design. I mapped out some level prototypes on paper and then built them out in a program called tiled. After importing the levels and art into the game we added the remaining polish.