Global Game Jam (January 2013)
After about a month of taking a break from my honours project. I wanted to shock myself back into the coding frame of mind. It's surprising just how quickly you can feel like you've forgotten everything. The jam was another 48 hour competition spanning the weekend. This time however, I was in a venue (conveniently, my University) instead of my cramped bedroom. Additionally, it was a jam, which meant I didn't have to go it solo. However, I didn't enter as a team so would have to find someone. As appears to be my theme for these competitions, I didn't have the entire jam schedule freed up on my calendar. It just so happened that I had two nights of drinking arranged for that weekend, both close friend's birthday nights out/house parties. As such, the plan was to get the base framework done, go out and get suitably drunk, return to do more code (probably crash at some point), sober up, go out again and then finish off the game. Before the competition started, there was a ice breaker to introduce every to everyone else to help people form teams. It was only fair during this that I was straight up honest about my plans. As was to be expected, I wasn't an attractive candidate to people. However I fell upon one person who had very similar plans. She too wanted to go out drinking and was an artist looking for a coder. Great, we thought, what better than to have both people out drinking during a 48 hour game creation competition. We soon found out we were both avid cat lovers and thus vowed to make a game with a cat in it some how. The theme came to be an audio clip of a heart beat. Well that's not an easy thing to work with when you're set on what's going to be central to the game.
We managed to come up with the story that you're a cat, called Darius, who's trying to find their owner. The player explores the house as Darius, trying to discover where their owner is and why the owner hasn't fed them. The (spoiler, I guess) ending being that they find the owner is dead and then find out why. The actual reason isn't something I believe we arrived to. The link to the theme was of course love and life. The cat loves it's owner and it's owner is... dead.
We carried on as planned, doing as much work as possible while we were still sober. I couldn't be bothered setting up source control and so instead kept the entire build in separate folders for each major change. Each folder contained a text file detailing the changes made. I went to the first house party and decided I couldn't not work and so took my laptop with me and looked the coolest person at the party, working away on a laptop. I did of course drink. I returned a few hours later to the venue and carried on coding. My memory, bizarrely, trails off around this point and I awaken a few hours later. I get back to my code and find the build is broken. Not good. Fortunately, I see that I've got a change log, good thinking drunk me. I check the file to find out what I had changed. "I don't even f*****g know" was the sentence I was met with. Marvellous.
I managed to bring it back and carried on working away. To cut down the time I would be away for the next party, I decided to pre-drink in the venue. I found out from a very dismayed venue supervisor that the premises was not licensed for this event. So I carried on without the drink. I managed to get a good amount done, the basics were there, so I treated myself by going off to the other flat party. I didn't go quite as hard on the drink this time around, I didn't want to be too ridiculous regarding the small amount of time left to complete the game.
What we ended up with was a "demo" level. The player could explore a scene which had 3 exploration points as well as knock over priceless vases. It wasn't much of a game, but having a really good 2D artist helped make it look very appealing.
We managed to come up with the story that you're a cat, called Darius, who's trying to find their owner. The player explores the house as Darius, trying to discover where their owner is and why the owner hasn't fed them. The (spoiler, I guess) ending being that they find the owner is dead and then find out why. The actual reason isn't something I believe we arrived to. The link to the theme was of course love and life. The cat loves it's owner and it's owner is... dead.
We carried on as planned, doing as much work as possible while we were still sober. I couldn't be bothered setting up source control and so instead kept the entire build in separate folders for each major change. Each folder contained a text file detailing the changes made. I went to the first house party and decided I couldn't not work and so took my laptop with me and looked the coolest person at the party, working away on a laptop. I did of course drink. I returned a few hours later to the venue and carried on coding. My memory, bizarrely, trails off around this point and I awaken a few hours later. I get back to my code and find the build is broken. Not good. Fortunately, I see that I've got a change log, good thinking drunk me. I check the file to find out what I had changed. "I don't even f*****g know" was the sentence I was met with. Marvellous.
I managed to bring it back and carried on working away. To cut down the time I would be away for the next party, I decided to pre-drink in the venue. I found out from a very dismayed venue supervisor that the premises was not licensed for this event. So I carried on without the drink. I managed to get a good amount done, the basics were there, so I treated myself by going off to the other flat party. I didn't go quite as hard on the drink this time around, I didn't want to be too ridiculous regarding the small amount of time left to complete the game.
What we ended up with was a "demo" level. The player could explore a scene which had 3 exploration points as well as knock over priceless vases. It wasn't much of a game, but having a really good 2D artist helped make it look very appealing.
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To check out the submission, click here
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What Did I Actually Do?
I joined with an Artist to create a game in 48 hours. The game had platforming and exploration elements implemented.