Gamejam 1.0 – II

Read Gamejam 1.0 – I

We got to the venue crazy early to get a good start. Once we were inside, we found a huge, airy office filled with trestles and chairs. I'd brought along a Mac mini, which housed the Unity Asset Server we were using, and a MacBook Pro to work on. Anto had his beheamoth PC gaming rig and Dave was on his windows laptop. It's a credit to where technology is at these days that given the mixed environment we only spent about two hours struggling to get our effing computers to talk to each other properly. When I was a kid that could have taken days.

Eventually we did get our machines working together and thankfully didn't lose too much time. We went to the front of the room for the announcement and our theme was going to be:

Non Violent Exploration

Good theme. Smart. Difficult to phone in. We huddled and tried not to be intimidated by the well-oiled machines around us whose computers all worked together effortlessly as they sketched out ideas on disposable whiteboards and coded like wizards.

[caption id="" width="580" align="aligncenter" caption="Dave"][/caption]

The idea we came up with was doable – a small robot exploring a spaceship – but we had a lot of unknowns, mostly about the coding side of things. Luckily for the group, Dave is a brilliant 3D modeller and got to work on corridors, doors, junctions and of course the wee robot, while Anto and I knuckled down and started to wrangle code together to create the mini-map and responsive lighting, as well as the layered, dynamic music that we'd talked about days earlier.

[caption id="" width="580" align="aligncenter" caption="Anto"][/caption]

To give the project something a bit different, I'd come up with the idea of combining Twine and Unity 3D. Twine is a brilliant little program for creating branching storylines and choose-your-own-adventure narratives all rendered as smart HTML pages, that can even work in some basic logic (conditionals, variables, computation etc.) using JavaScript. I realised that we could embed our Unity story in a webpage, and discovered this article about tweaking Twine to create pages that can talk to Unity.

...shit.

We were about five hours into our twelve hour stint when something really awkward happened. One of us pushed an update to the server that made Unity stop working, leaving us unable to sync or export our game in progress. This ended up taking quite a while to figure out, though we eventually realised that it had been caused by a blank file somewhere in the project, so it was an easy fix, but we lost some of our momentum in trying to work out what had gone wrong.

I also thought I had the Twine thing worked out, but it ended up actually being quite difficult to get functioning properly, so we had to change our initial idea to compensate, scaling back a lot of our ambition to improvise.

Finally, we had made some creative decisions at 9am that were looking less and less like good ideas as we approached the 9pm mark, mostly around control. Because our avatar is a cute little robot, we decided not to give him the ability to strafe; and we wanted to build the tension by making him quite slow-moving, but in our last couple of playthroughs, it was...unfun.

To be continued.