My submission for the 2024 GMTK Game Jam. Developed in only 3 days, following the theme of ‘Built to Scale’.

Social Blooming is a stat-raiser game where you are tasked with the care of a plant gifted to you by your parents during your first year at college. You will have to balance caring for the plant and maintaining your own college life each week, all the while keeping an eye out for the random happenings of college dorm life.

This project was designed, written and programmed by me in a 3 day period of time for the GMTK Game Jam 2024. Art was done by my sister, and audio was sourced from various free audio libraries. I began this project with the idea of a stat-raiser where you have to ‘balance the scales’, and wrote the story and systems to support such a system.

I was the sole developer, designer and writer for this project, and it went by fairly smoothly. I faced some difficulties in the initial plotting out of game loop, however after a few iterations I was able to solidify where random events and new additions to the activity pool would slot into the concept.

One of my main takeaways from this project is the importance of a clear deadline. Knowing that I only had 3 days to complete this project, I labored to ensure a playable version of the game was complete by mid-day 2. By doing so, I was able to get feedback and implement many changes to improve both quality of life and the accessibility of the game, all the while having spare time to add more events and daily ‘whims’ to the pool.