Three Amazing Chinese Indie Games, Created In Just One Weekend

Developers from all over the world took part in the Global Game Jam in late January. Over 4000 games were made in the span of a weekend, with about 15 coming out from China through the game jam location in Shanghai. Let’s take a look at what the Chinese developers came up with.

Over 30 development teams from China took part in the Global Game Jam on the weekend of January 24 – 26. During that time, developers created games from scratch following a set theme. This year’s theme was “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are,”a quote by the American author Anaïs Nin.

A total of 15 games from Shanghai were finished and available for the public to play. Some of the games take a little work to get running, but they’re free and, arguably, interesting.

Of the 15 games, Kotaku has selected three to highlight. That’s not to say the other games aren’t worthy, they totally are, but some of the games require understanding of the Chinese language.

Sherry Must Die

Arguably one of the prettiest entrants of the Shanghai Game Jam, Sherry Must Die was developed by Beijing-based developers. The artstyle looks very much reminiscent of Megaman Battle Network, and it’s no surprise that the core people behind it were the fine folks over at OniPunks.

The game is deceptively simple. Move Sherry around the board and kill little black bean thingies all the while trying to save white kitty thingies. Sherry can take damage, and she can’t kill the white kitty thingies. The more “beans” that she kills the more kitties that show up. It’s a simple albeit frustrating time waster.

This Way This Way

Another cool game to check out is This Way This Way (这边这边). The game is a very straightforward platformer with Zelda-style puzzles.

The player takes control of a little helicopter robot that needs to make its away across a field. There are lots of block puzzles to solve and pitfalls and spikes to avoid. The strength of this game is in its simplicity.

Using the keyboard, the player must unite a male character with a female character. The gameplay is similar to vertical platformers such as Doodle Jump. However, unlike Doodle Jump, the goal is to unite the heart in the middle of the screen. The twist here is that the characters operate on inverses, which means the male character drops down but the female player floats upwards.

I had a lot of difficulty figuring out how to do both sides of the game. To ensure solo players aren’t just moving just one character at a time, water grows on both sides of the screen. If a character is hangs around too long and swallowed by the water for too long, the game is over.

Global Game Jam – China [Official Site]