Ehilà!
This is the story of a new (I hope so) form of Game Jamming.
It so happened that the day after the Global Game Jam 2010 in Catania, at 9.08 in the morning, we (
me and
Rosario Milone of
Moonloop) took the Intercity train to Naples. After an hour of sleep (me) and music (Rosario), still half asleep I say:
"What about completing the GGJ game now?" [it only had the first level]
"Why not"
"But... why don't we do another thing, why don't we do another Jam??" - Rosario got excited..
"Yeah, let's do a train jam!"
"Wanna try?"
"How can we do, we don't have power plugs for the PCs!"
"So let's go on as long as the batteries hold!"
"OK"Rosario got REALLY excited, and I did too, because we really liked the idea of having a jam in this improvised way...
So it was born the...
Micro Game Jam (on rails) Ok, we needed a theme. Soon we found one:
"As long as we have battery, we'll never run into problems" 
Perfect, so the theme is energy, the batteries... charge... think... think... mmm...
We had to find a good concept for a game, of course in Flash, that had to be nice and low on graphics. I proposed something 'abstract', like Eliss, but in the end we created a 'tangible' context anyway.
Some sketches on the notepads that Microsoft gave us at the GGJThe concept is this: the player is in control of
an enormous floating tower (on the right in the drawing there's the initial versions, with threads or feet), something like Howl's Wandering Castle, but in water. The tower swims trough the sea, and is moved by electric energy, produced by a dinamo on top of it.
The player has to produce energy doing a
click-and-drag movement with the mouse on the
gear shaped dinamo on the top. In the meanwhile, he has to manage
small little units in the shape of batteries (you can see them in the sketch - left page, top - in 4 forms).
Those units are automatically produced in the core of the tower, and the player has to send them to
the Nodes on the tower (the white balls) via a click/gather and click/dispatch mechanic, like in Eufloria.
The units are needed because enemy units will come and attack the tower from outside, and drain energy. When energy is lost, the tower begins to sink, and
the Nodes begin to be covered with water. Once a Node is in the water, it can be attacked but not defended, so it's a very dangerous leak of power.
Once the energy reaches 0, the game is over.
The goal is the high-score, that is determined by how much distance was covered by the floating tower.
The JamAfter sketching the concept, we got out of the train that in the meanwhile had been swallowed by a big ferry that was roving through the Strict of Messina, towards Calabria. We got on the main deck and ate a big "arancino" (a Sicilian gourmandise) for the acceptable price of 2€, because game devs need fuel.
Once we got back in the train, we made a lot of calculations, wrote down a task list, made some simple meta-programming, and then...
3...
2...
1...
Contact!
We turned on the laptops in sync, but we soon found out that Rosario's was very low on battery, it only had 23 minutes left. We turned it off, and started developing on my Mac.
The timer said: 3 hours and a half. Mmm, a little too few.
Rosario completes the task list while I'm doing the first graphicsI brought out of the bag my trusty pen tablet, but soon found out that drawing a straight line in a moving train was impossible. So I drew the bare minimum to see the game in action, and then we moved on to programming.
We were lightning fast, Rosario even used some very bad code practices that I still dream at night, but he was very fast in creating the first classes for the game.
A closeup of the first prototype in motionTowards the end Rosario was a little 'roasted'
, because after 3 hours with a laptop on your... lap, you feel like you are in the Sahara desert. So I took the Mac and went on with the programming.
The scarf is now my symbol.After a lot of time in which we took some photos of ourselves (with the girl in the cabin thinking: "these guys are crazy"), sadly the Jam ended with the Mac having only 2% of battery, and Rosario that got out of the train because we reached his destination.
The endIn the end, we failed.
The game anyway was up and running, the programming is there at 60%. We need to re-do the graphics from the start, finish the game and do some balancing. Anyway, not bad for a 3-4 hours of work, we even started without a concept!!
Towards the end of the Jam, here's
a video interview with the developers involved in the jam. (sorry it's in italian!)
We're going to finish the game soon. I'll post the game and eventual art as soon as I have them.
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