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Piece Yourself Up is a 2D Top-Down Dungeon Crawler which was created for and won Kingston Game Jam 2024, for which the theme was 'Everything Falls Apart'.

My personal goal for this game jam was to be flexible, and to work with new people while hopefully promoting a good working dynamic. I was a third year Games Programming student, and I was paired with three (albeit talented) first year students, who were very new to games development, especially working in a team.

My priorities for this group were to

1) Promote a good team ethic, environment and structure, utilising Miro & Trello.

2) Enable the first years to participate to their full ability and desire.

3) Fill any skill gaps in the team.

4) While unlikely to win a prize, encourage the team to go for it and see what we could win.

I was the team leader and a game designer for the project. In my team of three first years, two felt confident enough to program the game in Unity, and one was happy to create art for UI & Menus. I focused on Production & Design, facilitating the team's ideas, and ensuring that we kept to a scope and focus that we could manage. I also ensured that our design would match the game jam's brief. Once the design was largely complete, my role was to implement the game's audio, for menus and gameplay.

This was my first stint at leading a game dev team, and where I started with 3 incredibly nervous first years who felt out of their depth, we became a confident team eager to do our very best, and if we failed - at least we would "fail with pride".

Not only did we manage to create a decent entry, but the combination of my team's effort, my leadership & guidance, the fact that every aspect of our game hit the brief, and my willingness to highlight my team's bravery and effort first and foremost when presenting - we managed to bring home the top prize!

This was my first official role leading a team, and winning the Game Jam against some fabulous games, with a team of first year student is a moment of pride that I will never forget. My long term goal is to become a Games Director, and so this felt like the first step towards making that happen.