Entrenched
Output: 2 songs, 22 sound effects
Timeframe: 72 hours
Team size: 5
The UGD 2024 Winter Game Jam had the theme of “X in an X.” 2 minutes after hearing this, it hit me… 2 kids in a trench coat, inside 2 kids in a trench coat. I’d convinced the rest of my team to do this by the end of the night, and when the morning hit we were full steam ahead. The game ended up winning 3rd place!
Entrenched is a short 2D sidescroller where you play as two 6-year-olds in a trench coat on top of a 12-year-old, all in a trench coat, making their way to a movie theater. The kids, inspired by a detective movie starring a kid, don trench coats themselves to try to get into this PG-13 film, despite being only 6 or 12. Thematically, the game is about layers of maturity and confidence. 6-year-olds, too insecure to do it alone, feign maturity to a 12 year old, so that together they can feign 24 year-old adulthood... and the kids you're playing as aren't the only ones, either!
The two songs stylistically matches the goofy nature of the game, while thematically representing the stacks of kids and their attitudes. The lines shift between the two versions of the song as new kids take new positions in the stack.
The sound effects, meanwhile, were a ton of fun. For the arrows in the DDR game, I made a pentatonic scale of successful notes that match the soundtrack, and some out-of-key notes for missed inputs. The victory and failure themes are also very silly.