Game Jam Kickoff!

The Theme

This game jam's theme was selected by Creative Assembly! I have played many of their more recent Total War titles and so I was very excited that they were hosting the jam. They chose the following:

Theme: Connect
Everything is connected! We only have to look around our home to see it is built with bricks that are all connected, the home is connected to the ground, maybe your home is connected to neighbours, living on a street connected to a village/town. This level of connection is apparent before we look at the wires, the plumbing, the fabric on the furniture; all held together by connections. During this time in the world, we are now connected by unseen digital lines, social media, shared thoughts and even the clapping on the streets for our nation’s keyworkers every Thursday. Just think, you can use ‘connect’ in a myriad of ways, so let your creativity fly! We are excited to see what you make!~

It's an interesting theme, and not one in the realm of my expectations. Granted, this being my second serious jam, I'm not sure what I expected. I wasn't sure what I was going to do immediately, so I set about brainstorming. Many resources online and the prototyping packet heavily suggests coming up with about five or six ideas and then tossing the first few.

Brainstorm

My notes on the initial brainstorm look like this (handwritten of course).

• A messenger running between two armies with a note to stop the war
• Connected Home Renovator. Remodel and Add-on to teetering houses held together by rope
• Slingshot Messenger - Must pass messages by slingshot
• Run a telecom company trying to connect a war-torn country through infrastructure
• A bungie Jumper with two bungie guns. He has to navigate dangers such as mountains and caves to put up radio transmitters
• A fast-clicker game that has people with thought bubbles that you must navigate in order to connect two people together.

I then went to eat dinner while avoiding thinking about it.

After dinner, I took a look at the list and immediately was drawn to two. I really like the RTS genre, which would fit the telecom company, but I've never even prototyped an RTS or a Simulation Game before, so I didn't want to rely on that much unknown. 

The second was the fast-clicker game. I feel like it fit the theme really well, provided some level of challenge to the player, and could allow me to further develop my skills.

I then set about working through the prototyping packet from the Side Quest site. I worked through Activity three of the packet, which made me think about character design, story, and sound. This took a little over an hour. The next step was to get the core game loop going in Godot.

Initial Prototype

For this project, I wanted to switch back to C# to try it again, now that I have used GDScript for several prototypes and a jam game. Immediately, I was hit by several issues that may force me back to GDScript. The nodes kept unlinking the scripts of instanced scenes. It took me some time to figure that one out.

Art

For art, I wanted to model some quick placeholder art, so I fired up inkscape and got to inking. Here is what I came up with.

For the associations, I'm not sure where I'm going to go for that. I signed up for an API at wordassociations.net, but I may not have enough time to get something useful out of that.

Code

For the code, as I mentioned, I had problems with C#. I ended up getting them worked out, but it's causing me headaches I don't really want to deal with now. Hopefully, it is just growing pains.

I used a dictionary to hold the thought parts and their textures, because I feel like that's going to change quite a bit and I don't want to lock myself into a bad structure there. I'm also trying to keep the idea of who's responsible for what in terms of classes and what needs to happen. For example, my thought bubble takes care of showing and hiding itself. The person just tells the bubble to show or hide, and it takes care of the rest.

After two hours of setting up the project and programming, it was time to quit. I had people in the scene, was randomly showing thoughts, which randomly picked between a cat and a dog. Not as far as I would have liked, but good enough. Here is a screenshot of what I have.

Next Steps

Tomorrow, I am looking to finish my core game loop, as this is critical and will tell me what I need to focus on or if I need to pivot entirely. A game without a core game loop is like a brain without a thought.

A sample of my ToDo list for tomorrow looks like this. As you can see, it relates specifically with my core game loop.

• Make thoughts spawned random every time
• Add 2 more thought parts to spawn
• Add 3 total thought parts to a thought
• Add clicking on thoughts to teleport