I participated in this year’s Global Game Jam with my friend Brian Hussel and had an enormous amount of fun putting together our game Transmission Towers: A Tale of Tedium in the span of just two days and nights (from Jan 26 to Jan 28). I worked on all the art and animation in Photoshop and designed roughly half of the platforming challenges, and Brian did the coding in GameMaker.

 

The theme this year was “transmission,” so after about an hour of brainstorming we settled on the silly idea behind our game. Open-world games have suffered from the same repetitive, often vacuous design philosophy for at least the last 6+ years; a great many being full of towers or viewpoints to climb to unlock a map full of dozens of meaningless collectible items. We decided to satirize this design philosophy.

In Transmission Towers: A Tale of Tedium, the player is greeted with an endless, procedurally generated open world, populated with various tress, rocks and grass—all my own original sprite work.

 

 

They spawn close to a transmission tower and have a massive blue arrow at their feet pointing right at it.

We wanted to shed light on the obnoxious hand-holding that these games typically include.

The tower (and all subsequent towers) are a series of randomly generated platforming challenges. Each room in the tower was designed by either Brian or myself, but the order and number of rooms in each tower is random, up until the top room where the player always reaches an empty room with a switch, which then unlocks more of the map and another transmission tower.

The arrow at the player’s feet then resets to point towards this new tower.

Getting to the next tower is deliberately tedious (hence the game’s title), but don’t worry! The map is full of collectibles, and outposts to liberate! There are three unique collectibles, the !, ?, and star, shown below, each producing a random word of encouragement when the player collects them.

 

The game tracks the number of collectibles you’ve collected, but it does only that. It’s simply a nice number to keep increasing.

 

There are also outposts to liberate—meaning that you walk over a sprite of an outpost, the black flag they’re flying turns white to signify surrender, and the game prompts you with a wonderful “OUTPOST LIBERATED!”

Deliberately pointless and silly, this is meant again to satirize the frequency at which open-world games throw copy-and-paste ‘bandit camps,’ ‘outposts,’ or ‘fortresses’ to try to keep players occupied as they traverse an otherwise bland and empty world.

Below is a taste of all the wonderful words of encouragement Transmission Towers: A Tale of Tedium throws at players:

 

It’s possible but unlikely Brian and I will ever completely finish the game, but we were able to get nearly everything we wanted into it by the 3PM Sunday deadline. Working without any real breaks for 48 hours straight (getting only ~6 hours of sleep total) was a strangely rewarding experience. I was able to see what I’m capable of at the extremes of my own creativity, and ended up quite satisfied. I was so focussed for so long that I was able to finish all the art we needed (including a menu just to spruce things up) all while having time to help Brian a great deal with level design.