Clownverse

Traverse the Clownverse is a comedy battle game. It was created for the Global Game Jam 2024. The game consists of two phases: the exploration phase and the battle phase. During the exploration phase, you can walk around the campus and explore to find hidden secrets. Once you find a battle, enter it and test your comedic talent with the game’s battle system. Traverse the Clownverse was developped by team Team Name, which was made up of the following people this year: Anthony Safatli, Lucy Woods, Mack Tapp, Nir Kazatsker, Will Watson, Charlie Baker and myself. The game is available on its official Global Game Jam page or on its GitHub page.

Game Description

Welcome to Clown College, you have worked tirelessly to get here and are ready to begin your journey to become the funniest clown. But when you arrive, things seem… off. An oddly unfunny haze has covered the campus, there is a dark hue to it. It seems that the professors of the prestigious Clown College have been corrupted by an entity known as the Void Clown. Their laugh-force is being siphoned to the anti-clown world. You remain uncorrupted and you need to purify them and restore their laughter. In order to save your new school, you’ll have to take part in comedy battles and win against each of the anti-clown.

The recommended commands for the game are as follows:

• [w] [a] [s] [d] keys to move and [spacebar] to jump
• mouse to choose your punchlines
• e to interact

Gallery

Game Development

Traverse the Clownverse was my team’s (Team Name) submission for the 2024 Global Game Jam. This year, the theme was make me laugh, which we think we achieved nicely. We all pushed ourselves hard and it payed off with a fun little game we can be proud of. I was had the chance to hold the Game and Sound designer position as well as share the Lead developper position with my friend Anthony Safatli.

The design

We decided on trying out a 3D game this year, which was a lot of fun to design for. Knowing how so few of us had made a 3D game before and knowing everything we learned last year, we knew we had to aim small for this project. We based our idea on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s slam battles. The player receives a joke setup and has a choice of three anwsers he can select. Each round having only 1 good anwser. The player’s score is kept at the top of the screen.

Watson also designed a very nice shader for us to use to represent the”infection”, which looked amazing in our assets. We also designed more sounds effects and had 3 different music tracks for the game, one of which came from my Demo EP.

The challenge

We had some difficulty with our battle system, we could not get it to work how we wanted it to. So we scrapped it and spent the night between Saturday and Sunday redesigning it completely, this time using a OOP approach. We separated the battles into their own scripts and the battel system into a script that would read those different scripts.

Final Thoughts

This year was a really fun edition, there was so many more people than the previous year, and it’s always so inspiring to see so many creative minds in the same place, working together and helping each other. Events like these remind me why I love the game development community.

We also appeared in a report from CTV about the GameJam and I had the chance to be interviewed by Ethan Hunt for The Signal, King’s College’s student newspaper. You can find the article here.

I would like to finish by thanking the mentors that were there helping us through the weekedn as well as ShiftKey Lab and Dr. Rina Wehbe for organizing the whole event for us again this year. I am looking forward to the next one.

Again, if you would like to checkout the game yourself, you can find it on its official Global Game Jam page or on its GitHub page. Github will have the most updated versions with bugfixes.