Crunch Time

Crunch Time was built during BeansJam 2022 around the theme "We have to stay awake". You play as an intern in a late-night office and try to keep your coworkers productive by delivering the drinks they ask for, all while punching the Sandman whenever he shows up to ruin the shift. It is a small and silly premise, but it worked very well for a jam because it created immediate time pressure, clear goals, and lots of room for humorous interactions.

This was my first ever game jam, and it was such a cool experience. My team and I were onsite at the RCADIA Hotel in Hamburg, so we did not just spend our time working on the jam, we also got to do a bit of sightseeing. We visited a submarine museum that was actually inside a real submarine and walked around the famous Reeperbahn. The other onsite teams were so wholesome, and the whole event just had a really good vibe. Our game ended up placing 7th out of 65 submissions, and I still give it a shot from time to time.

I worked on the programming side together with another programmer, while the third teammate focused on visuals. My main contributions were player and Sandman logic, the elevator mechanic, sound integration, UI work, and the state machine generator plugin we used to speed up character logic. For a 48-hour jam, getting iteration speed right mattered just as much as the actual features.

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