From Jam To Game - Screencheat's Humble Beginnings

Hello Screencheaters! What a crazy few weeks it has been. From the minute the beta was released publicly, we have been overwhelmed by the amount of support you guys have shown for the game. It’s great to see people playing what we’ve been working on for the better part of this year, and we can’t wait to show you guys what we have got in store for the full release with our first content drop next week. Screencheat has been an interesting project. What began as a Global Game Jam experiment in January is now a much bigger thing, and we thought it would be interesting to share the story of Samurai Punk, and our invisible shooter’s humble beginnings. The foundations of Samurai Punk began during the Global Game Jam in 2013 when myself and Winston Tang teamed up with Hadleigh Barton-Ancliffe and Emile Pascoe. We produced a little game called Samurai XX , which went on to inspire the name of our studio. Winston, Hadleigh and I worked with a number of team members throughout 2013, usually on jam projects, while we finished our final year of university. Winston and I started planning to launch Samurai Punk once we finished our degrees. When Global Game Jam 2014 was coming up, we knew we wanted to enter. We formed a fantastic team, featuring our previous members Winston, Hadleigh and myself, and we added Justin Whitfort into the mix. Then we were presented with the horrifying theme - we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. For those who don’t know, the Global Game Jam pits teams together across the world with the task of creating a game in just 48 hours from scratch. The objective is to deliver a game that is functional, fun, and somehow fits into the theme presented to everyone when the clock begins. It’s hard enough to pull it off at the best of times, but with such a perplexing theme, we were a little worried! After milling around the ideas of our favourite local cooperative games, we wanted to come up with a concept where players would communicate information to one another. We had the framework up and running, but we got stuck when we realised that players wouldn’t bother communicating seeing they could just screencheat. That's when it dawned on us - why not just make that the entire mechanic. After another hour or so of discussion we had the idea locked down to a super simple shooter, with strong level design to back it up. We had the game playable in around 8 hours and smashed out the rest of the game well before the 48 hours were up so we had plenty of time to mess around with other ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8NnbWO9FaW4 The first gameplay footage from the GGJ! Play it here ! After finishing up the jam, we were overwhelmed by the response we got from the other jammers. Then to our surprise, a month later we received multiple awards, including the Community Choice award for best game. It was around that time that we started hearing rumbling that our friends at Surprise Attack Games were interested in helping us take the game further. After a huge scramble to formalise the company and release our mobile game simultaneously, Samurai Punk signed with Surprise Attack Games to get Screencheat out to the world. By early March Justin and I had begun working full time on the project, beginning the overhaul from jam game to something