My First Game Jam – Claws Contact

Gotland Game Jam is a contest where you gather a team mixed with first, second and third year students and from 10 AM to 6 PM you have to create a game based on a special theme. This year all teams got the theme 
   
                                  Addiction X 

The thoughts of my team were: “How do we create a game the player for sure gets addicted to? What factors does make a player wanting to play the game again?” 
Our goal was to achive that the player feels a need to continue playing the game.
Together with three programmers from both the first and second year and two other artists inclusive myself we created a game we called Claws Contact. 

Claws Contact is a single player game played on the PC created in Game Maker by a team of students at Gotland University. The players task is with the help from a claw, pick up one of three gift boxes that are placed in a arcade game machine. You control the claw by pressing SPACE to move to the right, releasing SPACE to drop the claw and pressing ENTER to grab with the claw. 
Surrounding the gifts are green slime blobs which you want to avoid picking up. However if you accidently pick up a green slime blob you loose the game. But if you succeed picking up a gift box you win the game. Yet we made it very hard to succeed bringing the gift to the drop box. At most times the claw will loose its grip around the gift and it will fall down in the green slime blob crowd again. This event we thought would get people wanting to continue trying to win the game. The closer they got the gift to the drop box the more hope of actually succeeding would fill their mind and the frustration of dropping the gift would make them stubborn and wanting to continue.
Every time the player looses she has to insert a coin in the arcade game machine to continue trying. She would never stop until she had succeeded bringing one of the three gifts in. Not being able to and not wanting to stop playing the game until finally winning it we call an addiction and so our game idea was successful. Later this evening “Claws Contact” won one of the three titel awards, Best interpretation – for best interpreting of the theme. 

                        A pat on the back for my awesome team and myself!   🙂

(Down here is the link for downloading Claws Contact and play it yourself, enjoy!)
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yi7gv532f8apff9/AAA0_uPXbuAIFTdgMnahI7Vfa?dl=0