Global Game Jam Vancouver 2013

Start making a game based on the concept of aheart beat sound. I think that that is important too. It wasn't a picture, or a video, it was a sound. Time and motion.

If you're interested you can watch the global keynote.

Planning

To make a game in 48 hours you need to make a simple plan. Try to make something achievable that has stretch on the back side. You'd rather be in a position to add features after than striping "essential" features.

I started on paper in my note book.

I just started mind mapping as many ideas around Heart Beat as I could. I quickly settled on a new rendition of the Watch-N-Game Fireman game.

Then I turned to Construct 2 to implement. I added in a controller input, and created some simple placeholder assets.

After 3 hours I had a moving "bucket", with constraints in HTML5. I could hand this to someone else and explain what the core mechanic would be and have them understand and provide feedback about the feel.

I called it quits at 11:30. I'm not young and crazy enough to try going all night anymore.

Saturday

Some guys were sleeping under the spot I had been working last night. The room is filling up again and I'm starting the blog after Bram kicked me last night.

And now some Deadmou5 to help focus. On to the dripping blood.

You can play the game from DropBox for now.

Blood drips

I quickly setup a blood drop shape and constructed a few spawners. The logic setup is easy and the physics system lets me randomize the system easily.

Now on to catching them.

Game logic

Ive gotten the game logic in, it's a game. There's room for polish but it's playable. Now to start the art work. Once that's complete I can start adding extra features from the list.

Pretty

I start working on making the artwork more realistic. After finding a few tutorials online for creating lightning on Photoshop I adapt them to Gimp. A few layers and fractal clouds gives me a new background.

Once I get this into the game I find that the game is much, much darker. I think it might be a mistake, but I'm going to continue on with it.

The next line of development should be the heart. I think that is going to take a fair amount of effort.

Beating hearts

I've now drawn a heart and I'm animating it through scaling. I could do more but I'm going to finish the other art assets before do that.

The logic for the heart beat is pretty simple. Just doing a mod on the lifetime.

Return flow

One thing that I've noticed from watching people playing is the real need to show people that the blood flows back to the top once you've dumped it out onto the heart. I thought about using splines to make a nice animation but I think that is too fancy for now. I'm instead using particles.

But this brings up a new bug. My blood sprite is not square, the particle emitter assumes the sprites are square. I will have to fix this when I make the blood sprite.

Sunday

I need to take an hour to do some homework due today and then back to the game.

One cool thing is that this is the world largest single gathering of Jammers. Interesting what can bring people together.

Finish line

Down to wire, I'm waiting on the last audio assets, and I'm tweaking some art content.

My heart is pounding!

Done

It's all done.

Check out the final page. http://globalgamejam.org/2013/life-blood

Presentations

There are several game interaction ideas around pulses of energy.

The dog/water game's painterly style was very nice.