Blackthornprod game jam — day 0
It is already a few months since I am interested in game development. I really enjoy the possibilities and unleashing the imagination. This is a day to day story how I've joined my first game jam. Describing all the thoughts, wins and fails. This post is being written continuously while I am progressing, so everything can change any day.
Other parts of series:
- Day 0 (you are here)
- Day 1
Motivation
I really like watching Blackthornprod videos on YouTube. Beside this channel, I follow Brackeys and Sykoo. When I saw BTP started game jam I said to myself:
“Why not to try? There is nothing to lose and I can only gain from it. People will review my game (if I manage to finish any) and I will get a lot of feedback”.
Also, it is good there is a whole week for submission. I can work on it a few hours a day. My wife supports me in this so I am sure she will be patient with me. I am really thankful to her for this.
Brainstorming
The topic is “Game development”.The first thing that comes to my mind is the game “Game Dev Tycoon” made by Greenheart Games. You have your own software company and you make games. Nice idea but also quite big. Let's start small and progressively add features to the simple game!
The first idea
So… what is Game Development about? I’ve started with simple mindmap which I’ve used for the first time ever. For me, making a game means mostly programming. I am not really good at any kind of art so I code a lot. The game will definitely be about programming.
The game will encourage the player to program the character. What else you can program than a cute smart robot? I don't want to force any player to learn any programming language so I will prepare a set of commands. The player will use a graphic interface to set an order of commands which will tell our robot what to do.
Verifying the concept
I've started finding a sprite robot image that I can use as a placeholder to make development more “alive”. I've found out that animating a 2D character in Unity is really easy so I've set up simple Animator to control our robot.
I've added some UI elements and started writing a script to handle click on “Add” button. It will read what is selected in the dropdown and save it to the “commands queue”.
It is everything I have for the first day. I think the concept is valid and I will continue with the development on the next day.
