Improv Night is a Warioware/Rhythm Heaven-inspired minigame I created in Unity in collaboration with Jasper Hahn (who handled art direction and asset creation) in the span of 72 hours for Global Game Jam 2024, based on the theme "make me laugh". I was responsible for game design, programming, and sound design. The concept behind the game was to put the player in the shoes of a comedian who is dealing with a particularly rambunctious heckler, and must respond in time to the comedian's heckles to maintain the applause and appreciation of his audience. Improv Night was awarded MOST HONKTASTIC game at the Pratt Game Arts 2024 Global Game Jam site.
The gameplay of Improv Night centers entirely around the usage of QTEs, which are visually indicated to the player via a quip from the heckler. The player must press the space bar in time in response to the heckler's quip to quip back. The exact timing changes per heckle in order to prevent the game from feeling either too easy or too difficult. Additionally, the heckler can sometimes heckle up to three times consecutively, giving the player an opportunity for quipping combos. Programming-wise, improv night is built almost entirely off of coroutines. As this was the first game jam either of us had worked on, our goal was to create a short but finished game within the 72 hour period as a sort of introduction to working on game jams.
Improv Night is available for download on itch.io.
Given that improv night was developed in the span of 72 hours, it was definitely simpler than other games I've worked on, but overall I think we both were fairly satisfied with the final outcome. Since the gameplay was simple and was coded quite quickly, particular attention was paid to sound design and presentation as a way to make the game feel like a more complete experience. The intention for the sound design was both to help sell the idea of being a comedian/performing at a venue (we chose a jazzier establishment as our inspiration venue) and to give the player clear audio feedback for when they had successfully or unsuccessfully responded to a cue. Additionally, because the game was in part rhythm game-inspired, we wanted the sound design to feel appropriately musical as an homage to rhythm minigames such as those present in the Rhythm Heaven series.
While the sound design was appreciated from a presentation standpoint, at playtesting, it was also pointed out that the usage of a drum beat in the background alongside musical cues does actually end up being arguably too close to rhythm games to clearly convey that the game is a QTE-based minigame and not a true rhythm game, which as a last minute addition lead to the inclusion of a "how to play" screen on the main menu. If development time had been longer than 72 hours, I would have liked to expand improv night into a full blown rhythm minigame in order to properly take advantage of and align with the presentation of the game.
