Yep.

Alright, so who are you guys and what do you do at CoffeeStay normally?

Me?

Alright.

I'm Hannah.

I do writing and I do level design, so usually I'm the person that pisses people off.

That's my job.

I'm Ben.

I'm a technical artist and programmer and I also piss a lot

of people

off.

That's

true.

What game jam game did you

work on and what's it about?

Gladiator.

That's what it's called.

How is that spelled?

Yes.

It's an aggressively free-to-play MMO boss battle simulator, essentially.

It's kind of like a vertical slice of one of those boss battles that you could find in an MMO.

And a very silly version of it, let's just say.

Really good for the shareholders.

Extremely good for the shareholders, brings in a lot of money,

yeah.

So the theme of the jam was the game cheats.

How does this game cheat

you?

It throws up a lot of advertisements that are really well placed, so you would never accidentally click on them or do the wrong thing,

like

giving the boss a health potion.

Clicking on the ad actually opens

PayPal.

Some links do work.

It also tries to screw around with your settings.

So maybe you are a person that loves to play with inverted settings, inverted controls.

So that might accidentally turn on.

Maybe you like upscalers and your resolution gets dropped to like 10%.

So we have those tiny modifiers that are fun to play

with.

Basically, the game is trying to sell you things while you're battling the boss.

And it is unsubtle about it.

What was your favorite thing about the game jam?

About making the game or playing it or anything, really?

There's so many things that are fun about a game jam.

I mean, one, it's something different than you usually do, right?

It's refreshing.

You get to pull out creative parts of yourself that you haven't maybe in a while.

You get to do different things.

Like, for example, I got to do visual effects, which I think are super fun, but I don't really get to do that in my regular job very often, so.

That was really fun about it.

And then also working with different people more closely.

For example, Ben and I don't work that often together, but at this time we would.

And other people in the team as well.

I don't know.

It's just refreshing and fun in many ways.

Yeah, it's the creative expression.

You can put really a lot of tiny details in the game.

For example, last minute I decided to make a system to add

corpses of the player depending on how many times a player failed defeating the boss.

So in the end of the playtest the arena was quite full.

And also like tiny hints like we have a crowd system that is cheering you on when you get damaged they kind of calm down and they get excited again and those kind of tiny fingerprints of every developer is really really fun and that's something a game jam really allows to do.

Plus, we got to get some actual legit voice acting by yours truly.

And

I would love to do it again, by the way.

What?

No, no comprende.

Not even close.

Can

you repeat

that?

Oh!

Oh!

Uh, a

computer.

Yes.

100%.

For what?

Money.

No, no.

It's our camera.

We're adding it.

1.2 with the wallet drainer.

Coming in December, by the way.

I mean, you can technically win the game.

Yes.

Yeah, you can win the game.

How many people did win the

game?

Two

more games were made in the Game Jam.