Global Game Jam 2013 in San Francisco: Day 1
I’m up in San Francisco for the weekend for the Global Game Jam, an event in which we have 48 hours to create a game from start to finish. First off, I have an awesome team. Of course it’s mostly comprised of people I work with in my day job, but they are totally rad and therefore our team name is Team Awesome. LET IT BE SO.
Day 1 started with the making of ‘crowns’, which we color coded according to our preferred roles (like 2D art, 3D art, programming, design, etc.). Throughout the jam we’ll be getting stickers for various feats of strength that we can put on the crown to proudly display our accomplishments (for example: there is one sticker achieved by never looking at a cat for the entire GGJ). I’m pretty terrible at most things artistic or creative. In fact, I called this ghostie a “goomba” on numerous occasions. Nerd fail.
Next, the theme was announced. ”Heartbeats”. We brainstormed a mega list of ideas, including random things such as “Magic School Bus Arteries”. No idea was vetoed from the start. Good thing, because some of my ideas were freaking terrible. Jus’ sayin.
Stephen came up with a connection between the waveform of a heart rate monitor and the side of a key, and we thought about the idea of using the heart rate monitor to unlock a heart by manipulating tumblers. This was the first idea that really excited us, so we got to work. Stephen had a working prototype within an hour (which is one reason Shelley and I were so excited to work with him, dude is amazing). He decided to go with Love2D & Lua for development.
We moved into a conference room for some thinking time so we could get work done, iterated on our idea a bit, had a couple of people playtesting it, and felt that we had the glint of something good. Some more refining and we’re at a point where we have a clear direction and a slightly-less clear but still exciting overall plan. In fact, the game is running and is playable right now.
The game is all programmer art right now, but Shelley is hard at work coming up with some nifty art for the game.
Day 2 has just begun and everyone is quiet, slightly sleepy, and heads down working on our game. Today is the longest day of development and we have a lot of work to do. Onward!
