Gamejam 1.0 – I
As I say in the masthead for the site, I'm a filmmaker, not a game developer, but I obviously have a huge and deep interest in games. I've dabbled with Unity 3D, Twine and JavaScript for the last couple of years, but a wee while ago I saw a tweet up on Global Game Craft:
Early warning, the next Dublin GameCraft is the 18th of May.. more info as soon as possible, save the date #irishgamedev
— Global GameCraft (@GlobalGameCraft) April 19, 2013
I was seriously tempted by the idea of going in for it. I'd never tried to create something playable before, it was only ever tests and toys. I signed myself up and sent the tweet on to Dave and Anto who jumped on board as well.
A gamejam is a challenge to build a game from scratch within a tight time period. We were going to have twelve hours to create a game, start to finish, all based on a theme they would give us at the very beginning.
Prep
To prepare, the three of us spent a couple of sessions making sure our computers talked to each other ok, and we did a test run of putting together some levels and swapping code. I'm a bit obsessive about good collaborative workflows and I was delighted to find that the folks over at Unity 3D are as well. Included in the pro trial for Unity 3D is the ability to connect it to a central repository. This means that Anto, Dave and I can all be working on the same project in Unity and can sync our changes fairly quickly. It even allows for rollbacks, which is nice in case something goes horribly wrong.
Once we knew that our computers worked together, we chatted about ideas and Dave came up with a cool idea, that actions in the game would layer into and build up the soundtrack, essentially creating dynamic music. None of us are strong coders, but we came up with an elegant solution and decided we'd try to work that into the jam if it fitted the theme.
To be continued.