Day 1, preparations...
This was the first day! Lots of ideas, and nerves. It was not our first jam game (I even did other jams with my brother Ale), but it was the first one with my cousin Miguel. The first one with a proper designer!.
We were not going to work the full day: we live in a different timezone (Spain), so it was quite late for us. The plan was to get the theme, think about it, decide who is doing what and probably then going to sleep.
00:00am (around 19:00pm in Spain) - The theme was announced!
Build to Scale
It was a bit disappointing actually, not terrible theme but we were hoping for a more abstract theme like you are the villain, but it is what it is.
I had super weird idea, in the world of Web:
What if you had to maintain something that acts like a database cluster, but using workers. You can get more more workers, stronger workers, distribute load in different workspaces…
(didn’t convince many people with it).
We had some other ideas for puzzle games where the scale changed somehow:
- Maybe you have a potion to change your size
- Maybe you have another potion to change also weight
- …
But this wasn’t great either.
My brother had an idea about a cooking game, where you started with atom-level stuff (he actually mentioned something that I don’t understand (he’s physics), but let’s assume something super small) - and you ended up cooking galaxies!. The idea wasn’t bad but we were thinking how to make that fun…
The final idea came a bit later:
Let’s simulate a world, with different species and let’s see if we can make them live together in balance.
And there was the idea for our jam game!
Once we had the idea, we could easily define the tasks everyone was doing and start working. Not that much, since it was already quite late in Spain. I started working on the camera for the planet (a simple orbit camera).