Our 2021 Game Jam

Last year was tough for everyone. Covid-19 wreaked havoc on the world as we know it.

As lockdown hit, we — like all our industry peers — closed the ustwo games studio and turned to remote working full time to ride out the wave of the pandemic storm. At ustwo games, we have always been quite a close knit group of people, and suddenly spending all our time apart was a strange concept for us. We recognised that it was going to be really important to work on maintaining a sense of our studio culture —and we were faced with the challenge of discovering a way to do this remotely!

We began to organise remote events adapting to our situation, ideas we came up with to help us keep the studio morale high, this ranged from our fortnightly SLAQ (Slightly Lame Angel Quizzes…), remote yoga streaming, midweek Slack activities, morning workout zooms, group gaming nights and — perhaps ultimately — the ustwo games awards, where we came up with some fun (and silly) awards to celebrate some of the events we had witnessed as a remote studio — things like ‘The Loudest Typist’ and ‘The Wellbeing Warrior’. We even got everyone to dress up in their red carpet best for the ceremony.

Tackling the pandemic blues with the ustwo games awards! Watch out for the paparazzi!

We managed to maintain a sense of ‘ustwo games’ during the period of everyone working from home, but ultimately, emulating being together when you’re not is a massive challenge.

In early 2021, the second wave of lockdown hit, and despite our best efforts — morale was understandably low. We sensed that post a gloomy isolated Christmas break, we needed something exciting and different to look forward to — something that would give a spark of joy and help us to feel creative and inspired again. Our answer to this, was to host our first ever ‘ustwo games Game Jam’. Our plan was simple — The entire company is involved, all meetings and regular work cancelled for 1 week, and ALL disciplines are included. Groups were chosen so that individuals who don’t often get the opportunity to work closely were able to be teammates for the week. Those that had the veteran experience of game development were in their element and were happy to guide. And for some, the door was opened for the first time allowing them to explore the game development process.

The theme of our game jam was ‘Togetherness’. Fitting, as the ustwo games gang hadn’t been together for nearly a year at this point!

As you can expect, our week of jamming flew by! The most fun part of this week by far was seeing some of the snippets of joy coming from each of our teams as their work progressed.

Our Favourite Moments

Without any further ado — it’s about time these pieces of joy were shared with the rest of the world.

We would love to share our creations for the ustwo games Game Jam 2021 with you. We hope that you enjoy playing them as much as we had fun making them.

"We will be sharing our game jam games completely free of charge, but if our work has inspired you, or you feel compelled to spend some money — we would be honoured if you would consider donating some trees to our forest planting campaign — Alba’s Forest — our goal is to plant 1 million trees!"

Our Games

Beatzza By Kirsty, Lili and Justin | https://ustwogames.itch.io/beatzza