Huddled in a study room of SCAD's residence hall Victory Village, Leah Givens, a senior member of the swim team, worked tirelessly alongside her team of 16 other SCAD students. It was the last weekend of January, 2025, a set date that is infamous in the Interactive Design and Game Development program. Global Game Jam is an annual event, occurring in the last weekend of January since 2009. Across the world developers spend 48 hours creating games in response to the same prompt.

While SCAD students would typically work out of Montgomery Hall, the academic building that houses animation and game development classes, a rare Savannah snowstorm disrupted Leah's team from being able to meet there. So they pivoted and started working on their game in a study space at Victory. "Most of us had laptops with everything we needed on them," Leah says. "But some people brought their entire PC setups from home."

Global Game Jam's 2025 prompt was "Bubble," and GGJ encourages developers to interpret the prompt however they'd like. Leah's team decided to work with speech bubbles, more specifically speech bubbles as weapons against annoying co-workers in their twin stick shooter "Suck It Up." 
Working on a tight schedule set by the project leads, Leah got straight to creating assets. As an environmental artist, she was in charge of working within the art team to build the spaces that the characters would move through. Cubicles, floor plans, and various levels of the multi-story office building came to life within the first twelve hours of her work on the project, but Leah's work did not stop there. She continued to assist the group once her assets were created, Leah stayed and completed "fun tests" of the most updated version of the game every six hours. "Is our game fun?" she would ask. "If it's not we're doing something wrong."

After 48 hours of coding, designing, and integrating assets, the trailer for "Suck It Up" was submitted, and a few moments later it was awarded "Best In Show" from SCAD Savannah's submissions that year.

Alongside a commemorative trophy, winning "Best In Show" came with the opportunity for Leah and her team to participate in the Georgia Game Developers Association competition. With six weeks to prepare, the team worked with an industry mentor to fine tune the game and prepare professional level pitch packaging. Their attention to detail paid off, and "Suck It Up" won again, this time against the best games from other top colligate teams in the state.
Winning the GGDA competition meant huge opportunities for "Suck It Up," especially in the convention sphere. Due to their competition success, the team was invited to table their game at conventions across the state of Georgia. Leah was able to attend DreamHack Atlanta where she was surrounded by video game fanatics, other aspiring artists, and big industry names. The team's biggest takeaways from their convention circulation was the feedback they received from play testers. "We would take their feedback home to our Airbnb and make a quick change to test how it could work," Leah says.

Moving forward, the "Suck It Up" team has hopes to produce the game with a company they align with, but in the meantime many of them are working on a senior capstone assignment together. The new project, "Siren" (title work in progress), tackles similar themes. "We really like satirical stuff, and it's commentary on current events," Leah says. Set in a casino in the lost city of Atlantis, the team challenges players to think about greed and unseen monsters.

One of Leah's favorite parts of game development is the team she works with. "I didn't know everybody when we started but now they're all my best friends," she says. The same is true for experience as a member of SCAD's swim team. "I'm definitely going to miss the swimmers the most," she says. "They're so sweet and supportive." As she gears up to finish her colligate swim career and transition into postgrad life, Leah is grateful for the lessons she's learned from her time in the pool. For her, "swim has given me the world."