Carni-Ball

Go to the Carni-Ball itch page and play it in-browser by clicking here!

Carni-Ball is a game created within 5 days for the SGDA Summer Game Jam 2022. The game was created by a team of five members, including myself (In charge of game design), Esteban Aldana (Focusing on programming), Jackson Richmond (Created the sounds and music), Jonathan Listman (Handled the art), and Leon-Paul Lynn (Handled the writing).

For this game, I started by brainstorming with my teammates to come up with potential game ideas. We wanted our game to satisfy both themes of the game jam, which were “Game Over Is Not The End” and “Party Games.” The idea I came up with was heavily inspired by the gym game of “survivor tag,” which is a sort of free-for-all dodgeball where balls are scattered around the gym floor and players must grab the balls from the ground and throw them at the other other players in order to tag them out. However, when a player is tagged out, they must sit on the floor until the player that tagged them out is tagged out themselves, in which case they stand back up and rejoin the game. I thought a game similar to this in concept would work very well as a party game where players are never truly taken out of the game until one player is left standing.

With this idea in I mind, I created a design document that my teammates could reference as they performed their tasks, to make sure they understood the direction of the game. The design document can be accessed by clicking here. The idea was expanded to become a four-player dodgeball game where players would compete over the control of a single dodgeball, and getting hit by the dodgeball would mean that you become a ghost that is now capable of possessing obstacles to mess with the living players and attempt to take your revenge on the player that tagged you out. When a player is hit by the dodgeball, all of the other players that were tagged out by this player return to being alive, and thus get another chance of winning the game. In this way, the game fits both the theme of “Game Over Is Not The End” and “Party Games”!