So, last month Cheese decided he was going to participate in this #Adventure Jam thing. Apparently, some groovy people on the internet (Cassie Benter & Stacy Davidson) decided to make an adventure game in 2 weeks and invited the whole world to join them in this forntight-long adventure game jam thing.

Having only recently learned that the theme for the MAICon event coming up in September was going to be 'Under the Sea,' Cheese was inspired and excited to do something sea-themed. What emerged was a cute little adventure game about an orange octopus named Yok-yok, who is scooped up from the sea by aliens. Yok-yok has to figure out how to get the spaceship going again with the help of the other sea creatures that have been collected by the aliens. Oh, and we decided to call it Above the Waves :3

Realising that Cheese was going to be under a fair amount of pressure trying to do the whole thing himself in only two weeks, and curious to try my hand at animating, I volunteered to help out. In the end, Cheese did all the coding, map logistics, puzzle design, background images, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I can't even remember, whilst I did some images for Yok-yok's animation and some sketches of the other sea creatures, who we unfortunately didn't have time to animate. In the last hour or so I managed to quickly do some basic images for a slideshow-like cut scene that shows Yok-yok being abducted.

Turns out, animating is pretty tricky, but also paradoxically not that tricky :P It was quite hard trying to work out how to get the animation to do what I wanted (why did I try to learn using an octopus?!) but it was really satisfying when I finally got something to work, and very encouraging to read people's positive comments when I tweeted some animations :3

Sadly, everything is much more hastily done than we would have liked, and knowing what our initial visions were makes me a bit sad that we didn't have time to get everything in before the end of the jam. That said, this was my first game jam, and my first time at animating, and I'm really pretty proud that we were able to produce a somewhat solid little game, which mostly makes sense (sorry about the puffer fish puzzle guys - it would have made more sense with the puffy animation!), in such a short time frame.

Oh! I haven't told you yet how to get your hot little hands on our game!

Download Above the Waves for free here! 

It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. If you do try it out, please let us know what you think! Comment below or email us at contact@twolofbees.com. We eat your feedback! We eat it up!

Cheese and I are hoping to be able to put some more energy into Above the Waves to make it more accurately reflect his original vision. In the meantime, there are only a couple of days left to vote for Above the Waves on the Adventure Jam site. No pressure, but if you want to you can visit our game page and vote for us here (you will need a Game Jolt account), or check out the other entrants' games here. And in case anyone's interested, there are some bits of artwork here as well as archived videos of Cheese doing development type stuff on Above the Waves over here, and here, and also here! Oh, and there's also some stuff up on Cheese's Patreon page (concept art, design document, and other junk), but only patrons will be able to check that out, sorry! Whew! So many links!

Overall, it's been fun, and I only wish that Cheese and I had been actually able to devote the full fortnight to the game, rather than having our jam interrupted by silly little things like having to work, and sleep, and so on. Lots of love to everyone who's played the game (lofloflofloflof!) and to everyone who's going to check it out now that you've seen this blog post (lofloflofloflofloflof!) - we love you all, thanks so much for your support! Peace, out.