Man...Games are hard. That’s right, my first game-jam- whose theme was “Educational”- has come and passed, along with it a startlingly-fast twelve hours of my life. I figured, though, that I could waste another hour or so looking back on it, for my learning as well as your amusement.

Dolphin Murder Simulator

Yeah, uhm, this was educational, I suppose. The thing is a typing game alla Typing of the Dead, but with adorable animals to decimate. Not my idea, though: I was just the sound guy. Sound effects for the shotgun (which may or may not have been photoshopped out of Doom), dying animal squishes, and a soundtrack written in MuseScore2 that can only be described as “Inspired by Carnival Games.” The Kinect one. We’re all still humming that damn tune, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

My first takeaway was just the sheer volume of music I was writing, and how maybe a little less than a third of it never got used. The problem was that I started composing as soon as we had talked out an extremely rough outline. My decision following “dolphin murder simulator,” was, naturally, something extremely dark. The opening few measures go like a SNES victory jingle, but from there on it’s synthesized bass thumping angry like a misunderstood teenager. I got quite a good ways in, realized I should check in with the others...and everyone decided this was too dark. It was also about 40 minutes down the drain, and far from the first bit to get scrapped.

I am super happy with my contribution, though- as soon as my jolly bit kicked in with the Doom super shotgun blasting away, other teams were in stitches. Mission Accomplished.

*(I don't actually have the sound files from DMS yet, as they were made on the same computer that was exporting game builds...and that computer was not my computer)*

First2Learn Pro- Rehabilitation Edition!

As for me, I finished my part on DMS with half the jam left, so I decided to download Twine and become a Video Game Master™. My plan: a fake education software that was supposed to appear like an education tool for prison convicts. Then, I added a bunch of pseudo-hacking prompts because it turns out sitting at a white screen answering arithmetic questions isn’t too fun. From there I spiraled, adding puzzle mechanics and half-baked #content whenever it came to mind. My thoughts generally ranged from “This is gonna be awesome” to “This is inane” as the evening progressed, and in the end, not one of my puzzle mechanics was actually working. I had a whole bunch of lore and multiplication problems crammed in there, though, and there was technically a way to win, so I suppose I ought to consider it a success conceptually.

All those stories you hear from developers, about how loads of work gets cut, and how it’s easy to bite off more than you can chew, seem obvious while listening, but BOY is it easy to make all those mistakes no matter how prepared you are. Good thing the jam was fun or I would be supremely cross with myself.

Where Now?

Well, I’m writing a new text-based adventure that is more in the vain of Zork than my harebrained scheme, and it’s called Penultima. The music is coming together a lot like 16bit JRPG stuff, and I’m very excited to keep working on this mess without heavy time constraints. The thing that’s stood out to me the most as I bang this one out is the interesting constraints of text-based adventures- text isn’t inherently fun, nor is it always attention-grabbing. As I’ve had friends play through segments, long passages between player interactions have almost all been scrapped, and the tone has become far less serious, now bordering on an Alice in Wonderland vibe that focuses on interesting scenarios over heavy meaning or deep characters.

On a larger scale, though, I befriended the other guys who worked on DMS, and we’re currently drawing up some design documents for a semester-long reimagining of the Tron arcade cabinet, inspired by Pac-Man Championship Edition (they’ve actually developed a cabinet before...I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited). I’ve been working in Audacity to get some sound bites from old cabinets shown on Youtube up to snuff, as well as compressing/distorting sections of the 2010 Daft Punk soundtrack, to make a collection of effects and tunes that combines old and new in a way that’s cool without sounding forced. I don’t just want to work in music and narrative, though, and the rest of the team sounds more than happy to teach me some basics in Unity while I’m building the Unity3d tutorials like Tilt-a-Ball, UFO, and the "Space Shooter" thing. Life is exciting, duders.