Global Game Jam 2020 - Emojinal Van Hearts

Global Game Jam 2020

Another year another game jam! This year my team and I set a goal for ourselves that we had to make a game in 3D since most of our experience has been in 2D. The theme of the game jam was repair. We struggled for a long time Friday night to land on an idea that we wanted to stick to. I had joking written “Drive your van into my heart” (a Steven Universe reference) on the white board as we were pitching and spit balling ideas. Little did I know that we eventually looped back around and latched onto the idea of literally driving a van into your friends heart to repair a friendship. Around this time is when Matthew Horoszowski landed on the core idea of matching emoji responses and Emojinal Van Hearts was born.

Emojinal Van Hearts

The concept of Emojinal Van Hearts is that a player is presented with an emoji and must decide which three emoji responses their friend would choose. Choosing the correct answer strengthens the friendship and each failure sets the friendship back. Josh Altman provided an awesome song for the game that builds in excitement and happiness each time the player gets a correct answer. This ultimately leads into the friendship being repaired and the two friends coming together again.

The game is fully playable in a web browser. Player 1 uses WAD to drive the van to figure out Player 2s response. Player 2 uses the left, up, and right arrow keys in the “selection” zone to choose their emoji response. I hope you check it out!