For the 2025 Global Game Jam, I worked with a group of 6 people to create The Big Cheese, a top-down, 3-D strategy game in which the player clicks on requests and either gives money, buys cheese, or sells cheese to cities, suburbs, and the dairy farmers.
One of my favorite contributions to the game was the menus. For the main menu and loss screen, I created a projection of a 3D camera’s view on a 2D plane, which allowed me to put spinning cows on the main menu.
As for my biggest contribution to the game, it would have to be the behavior of the world itself, as in when certain events take place, which are displayed as bubbles on the screen or scrolling text at the bottom. Each of these events are not random, for they are based upon a state machine that describes a binary decision tree. The branches of this tree are chosen based upon a player scoring system with 4 criteria: how much cheese they have in, how much money they have, what percentage of votes have they received, and what the city health is at. The tree itself ends in 16 unique states, which have differing probabilities which describe the spawn rates of specific bubbles and the chances of “random” events occurring. To the player on the outside, it just feels as though the world is just acting in an “unlucky” manner, but in reality it was made to make certain events much less likely when the player would need them to occur. An example is when the player needs to sell cheese in order to earn money, they would have a lot in their inventory, so the probability of cities and suburbs asking for cheese is much lower in that state.
Thanks for a last minute balancing addition made by one of my teammates, and for the robust AI of the dairy farmers made by another teammate, the game does feel intelligent in a way, or as intelligent as a milk market propagated by a corrupt politician can feel. That being said, I am very proud of the work we all did for this project, and I am excited to participate in next years Global Game Jam!
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