Party Manager 2020
Party Manager 2020 is a Game Jam game built by a team I led for the theme "2020." It plays out like an Arcade game where you have to appease your guests as fast as possible to earn points and not let the party meter burn out. Keep them happy with food, conversations, and good music to end the year with a bang!
Contributions
Project Lead
Lead Audio Design
Systems Design
C# Programming
Needs
All three ways to satisfy party goers have different values and difficulties. Changing the music effects everyone in the room who is upset with the music to varying degrees depending on what they wanted, while feeding people has to be individually taken care of. Because feeding is harder, they will accept any food but with different levels of satisfaction. Conversations, being the easiest, require the right one to improve their happiness.
Micromanaging
The arcade style of gameplay requires there to be an inevitable loss after the difficulty ramps up exponentially. Each guest increases in dissatisfaction and needs the longer they are left unattended, and with each level of frustration the party meter dwindles faster and faster. It’s up to the player to keep people pleased as quickly as possible to achieve the highest amount of points they can.
Audio Design
While obviously hard to demonstrate in a gif, all the audio in the game was done using just my voice for a diversifier in the game jam. Everything from the radio stations to the pickups were voiced by me as the lead audio designer for the jam. Given how important it was to give the player feedback about how they are doing, making sure there were plenty of audio cues for correct/incorrect actions was key.
Layout
When designing the level, I wanted to keep the food, music, and open floor separated to help with the chaos of micromanaging. Other than the few that can spawn on the stage, guests stay in a random but centralized location in the middle of the room. The player is already so busy with the individual needs that having a complicated room with different walls and barriers to walk through just seemed punishing rather than interesting. The props were carefully spread out to keep it interesting without being in the way.
Visuals
Having a team with two artists really helped make this level come to life. There are over a dozen unique characters that can join the party, as well as fully original 3D models to make up the room. The textures were also all original, and I spent a decent amount of time working on the lighting and implementation of the art. Many surfaces like the floor were just reused textures of other objects to fill in the room better, and I think it worked pretty well!
