The Reveal
The reveal for our second game jam was very different to the first and a big surprise too. I’d expected it to be along the same lines as before: a card and a random phrase or perhaps just a random word as we had for the Unity game jam and the GitHub Game Off.
No, this time was completely different. We were asked to use Wikipedia‘s Random Article feature to find a person, a place and an event and somehow combine them with the phrase “As long as we have each other we will never run out of problems.” This was definitely going to be interesting and sounded like great fun.
Idea Harvesting
Hitting Wikipedia I soon realised getting the three elements wasn’t going to be as easy as I first anticipated. I always knew it was big but I fell foul of getting sidetracked with some very interesting articles on the one hand and had to sift through pages of utter c*** on the other. I got there in the end and my three were:
Place: Holway, Wisconsin
Person: Janet Treasure OBE
Event: Ghost Festival
I really lucked out with the Ghost Festival as I’ve been fortunate to have witnessed this event first hand during a trip to Sarawak in Malaysia.
(During the kickoff webinar, I was served up Cathedral Discography, a page about a Doom Metal band which could perhaps have served as either the place or the person. I am seriously thinking of trying to combine this in some way although I’ve absolutely no idea how at the moment.)
Idea Decomposition and Early Creativity
Starting with the three, base ideas and dropping them onto my creativity board (the pink tickets) I ran consecutive thought trains as shown above.
- Janet Treasure OBE took me in the direction of a medical protagonist, ultimately ending up with a cape-wearing, superhero nurse.
- Holway, Wisconsin took me in several directions. The first, an urban environment leading to decay and disease and the second linked up with the original superhero idea. I also did a very rough sketch of the state of Wisconsin that looked vaguely cat shaped. Thinking back to the original theme idea of ‘as long as we have each other’ gave me the idea of giving my superhero NHS nurse a cat as a sidekick.
- Ghost Festival went a bit Resident Evil if I’m honest, most likely influenced by one event that’s been in the news of late and the fact I watched Doomsday on Netflix recently.
In summary, my early thoughts are:
The world is being overrun by a rampant virus and the very existence of humankind is being challenged. Our only hope is a superhero nurse, armed with a virus-killing vaccine in her trusty syringe and her sidekick moggy with the extraordinary ability to identify infected humans.
Game Mechanics
- Character switch between the nurse and the cat to change between fight and find
- Infected humans will infect other humans if not social distancing
- Nurse can find a mask and other PPE for protection against virus
- PPE has a limited life
- Syringe must be refilled from time to time
- Higher levels have mutated virus that is harder to kill
- Higher levels have rats that spread a stronger strain of the disease
- If the cat becomes infected it will attack nurse unless healed with vaccine
- Nurse can give masks to humans to help protect them from the virus
- Cat can kill rats and needs to get them before they infect the nurse
- Virus spreading spiders dropping from the ceiling on webs
To Do
- Work out how to heal
- Work out game over scenarios
Add a diversifier- Design a boss
Adding a Diversifier…
Whilst looking for a diversifier I found a great page on the Global Game Jam website (https://globalgamejam.org/global-game-jam-diversifiers) packed full of interesting ideas. The one I chose was “Time Lord” (item 17 from the 2017 Global Game Jam). This diversifier adds variations to the game play based on the time of day (presumably in the player’s locale) it is being played. Initial thoughts for variations are:
- vary loot drops and items according to time of day/day of week
- vary scene based on time of day — I believe I can achieve this with a shader to avoid redrawing all the art assets. It is also a good excuse to play around with dynamic lighting
- vary game denizens based on time of day — business people during the day, party goers at night?
Conclusion
Once I’d overcome my initial frustration with the source website and wading through all the c*** I really enjoyed this exercise. It will be vey interesting to see how the game evolves over the next few days leading up to the final presentation on Wednesday, 18th November.
Having disassembled my performance in the previous game jam I am aiming my sights considerably higher this time around. As I wrote in the discussion forum, I want to take more risks this time and be a lot more courageous. I’m hoping that the initial idea will be the right vehicle to realise this through. In particular I want to experiment more with lighting, visual effects and code a basic AI for the NPCs.
This will be a much bigger project and unlike the previous one, this time I’ve chosen to open the repo on GitHub and make it available here: https://github.com/ScaryBlankPage/Basalt
PS let me know what you think of this idea!
List of Images
Figure 1. THORN, 2020 Game Jam 2 Creativity Output
Figure 2. THORN, 2020 Game Jam 2 Creativity Output (Linked)
