For our game jam, our team (The Big Sexe) got together on the first night to try and decide on a type of game we could make using the theme of 'boiling point'. It was quite hard to get our thoughts organised at first as we all had quite different tastes in games, but after a while of discussing we realised that the majority of members were fans of the Zero Escape series, a trilogy of adventure games with visual novel aspects by developer Uchikoshi Kotarou. These games feature point and click escape-the-room aspects with heavy focus on puzzles, so we decided to create an escape the room game during our game jam.

Our team was fairly organised and well-structured during the game jam. I'd previously watched a recording of an AX panel detailing Uchikoshi's processes when making the Zero Escape games and, similar to Uchikoshi's end-to-start planning process, we wrote a short list of processes the player would have to go through to escape the room, starting with the escape and working backwards to the beginning so as not to get lost. This also gave us a list of objects that needed to be drawn and modelled, and a brief outline for the plot which would allow the script to be worked on.

After receiving basic design sketches of characters from other team members, I worked on drawing the character sprites for our two characters, Stella and Steve. During this time, other team members worked on the script and blocking out the room which the player was to escape from (a single room so as to fit within the fixed screen limit). After this, some of the team began blueprinting and inputting script, while some of the team worked on drawing and modelling the 2d and 3d aspects.

The game-making process went relatively quickly and smoothly since our team was quite organised and we ended up with a decent amount of time to spare towards the end. Everyone was quite proactive and I think the right people ended up doing the right jobs so that everyone worked to the best of their abilities. I was quite happy with the game in the end, though some of the puzzles were maybe a little too ambitious for such a short time. We did have some issues with letting everything be clicked in the right order but Sam B (blueprinting expert of the team) managed to work through all of these expertly so that we had a fully functioning finished project.