Developer Brian Fetter talks to The Escapist about competing in the Global Game Jam and future plans for Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a local co-op game about defusing bombs developed at the Global Game Jam last weekend. The Global Game Jam challenges teams around the world to rush from concept to working game in just 48 hours. Developed by a team of four, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes has one player use an Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra motion controllers to defuse a bomb based on instructions given by the other players, who have access to an instruction manual. The player wearing the virtual reality headset must describe the bomb to the other players, who cannot see the bomb and must scour the paper manual for the right answers. In the video, the asymmetric local co-op gets pretty tense, especially once the timer on the bomb hits 30 seconds and counting. The game won first place at the Algonquin College game jam site in Ottawa, Canada.
The game is freely available on the Global Game Jam website, though it requires an Oculus Rift, a Razer Hydra, and is Windows-only. Asked about the next steps for the game, developer Brian Fetter tells The Escapist, “After the way the game resonated with people we definitely want to continue with it. We had a lot of great ideas for improvements to it that didn’t fit into the 48 hour game jam but we still need to work out how we want to proceed. I think we would all love to see this become a full product.”
“In Ottawa, Algonquin College hosted around 100 participants including both seasoned local game developers and fresh college students,” says Fetter. The Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes team consisted of Fetter, Ben Kane, and Allen Pestaluky, with music created by Liam Sauvé. Kane is the founder of Going Loud Studios and creator of DLC Quest, a satirical adventure game that was greenlit on Steam. Pestaluky is a software developer at mobile developer and publisher Magmic. Sauvé is a sound designer for Magmic. Fetter is the founder of Bitstim, a software development startup. Fetter says, “This was the first game that we all worked on together.”
Personally, I’m eager to see more of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It looks like it has all the right ingredients to make a great party game, as long as you’ve got an Oculus Rift and a Razer Hydra handy. I already spend parties yelling at my friends to decouple the fluxtrunions in Spaceteam. Yelling at them to cut the red wire seems like a natural progression.
Update:: The creators have set up a mailing list for updates about Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.
Source: Global Game Jam
Published: Jan 30, 2014 11:40 am