Saving Scuba Steve

Created in 8 hours for the EGX Rezzed 2016 Creative Assembly GameJam with the theme of “Flux” and diversifiers of “Liquid”, “Waves” and “Sound”. With this game we managed to position 2nd in the competition and were the only complete team of Students at the GameJam. In Saving Scuba Steve you play as two mermaids that are destined to protect Scuba Steve as he plunges down the dark ravine, seeking the pearl that lies at the bottom. As Steve travels down to the bottom he is attacked by hoards of Fish-Bombs that must be repelled by the Mermaid’s water waves so he can successfully reach the bottom. Saving Scuba Steve is best described in short as a twin stick, Pong-style shooter. You can watch the livestream of our presentation as well as the rest of the submissions here.

The gameplay in Saving Scuba Steve the two mermaids shoot waves of water between each other. With the two sticks of the controller you control their vertical position on the left and right side of the screen. You control from which Mermaid to shoot from and the water wave is shot to the other with a small cool down between each shot which repel the Fish-Bombs away. Blue Fish-Bombs spawn at random intervals which the player has the choice of letting them hit Steve for an extra life but causes an increase in spawn rate and a small speed up of the game.

Saving Scuba Steve was, I feel, one of the most successful GameJam’s we have completed to date: it is the most complete game we have created with a proper end state and fun gameplay with difficulty progression. There is no feature that I wish we had added before the 8 hour deadline, but the game is something that could be made into a mobile game quite easily and be enjoyable with different levels, more enemies and power-ups. I learnt a lot about working to create a complete demo of a game in such a small time frame and focusing on the basic building blocks of the game that are necessary instead of the finer details.