About the Project

International Chef is a cozy, restaurant-simulation game where you serve customers foods from the developers' different cultures.

Made in Unreal Engine 5.

About the Project

Driving Bad is a single-player, driving game themed after the cinematic world of Breaking Bad. Play as Walter White—drive your RV, steal chemicals, cook meth, and deliver it to Jesse in order to make enough money to purchase treatment for your lung cancer.

Made in Unity engine.

Conceptualization and Game Design

Secret Santa Game Jam is a game jam where you request a game and you receive someone else's request for a game to make. The request received for this game jam was very simple, just something to do with cars. With such a broad topic, it's difficult to narrow down what exactly kind of game to make.

Initial brainstorming started with what could we do exactly with the theme "car," in which we broke it down to the affordances of a car and car as a theme for a game. We were drawn to the ability to customize a car, which would entail a shop being a big part of the game's systems.

From there, it was a matter of figuring out the specific game mechanics, core gameplay loop, and systems for the game. Thankfully, the theme of Breaking Bad actually was very helpful in brainstorming the aforementioned things, as we could take the things that the characters do and the stakes in the tv-show and re-spin it in a games sense. Walter White has to steal chemicals in order to cook meth and sell it to gain money for his family. Ultimately, he does this because he has terminal lung cancer. We spun this in our game to be our core gameplay loop of driving, stealing, cooking, and delivering with the player goal of purchasing cancer treatment.

It was smooth sailing from there, with us brainstorming ideas for obstacles such as police cars chasing after you and Skylar (Walter's wife) calling and partially blocking your view of the screen until you respond to her. Ultimately, we came away with a solid game that we were very proud with, especially for a game jam.