It’s been about a month since the first ever ICT Game Jam ended. I took part mostly just to show my support for local things like this as I’m not all that interested in game development otherwise. That was freeing in a way, I went in just to have fun (which I think everyone else did too), no pressure on myself to even have anything functional at the end! Of course, I’d love to have something neat on the other side of the weekend, but that wasn’t my goal.
So, seeing as I wasn’t really interested in game development – and all the major “free” game toolkits (Unity, Unreal, etc.) don’t play nice with GNU/Linux or are in a language I don’t enjoy, e.g., Phaser – I decided if I was gonna do it I wanted it to at least be interesting (to me if no one else). That meant choosing some tools I was actually interested in and at least knew enough to get started in them, which boiled down to either Haskell or Elm. I ended up deciding on Elm, mainly because I’ve been wanting to do something with it and this seemed like a good opportunity.
I came up with a few abstract concepts I felt I could have a chance at actually making and either adapt to whatever theme was chosen or just ignore the theme and do my own thing (^_^).
The night before the event started I whipped up a little prototype (if it can even be called that) of one of my ideas just to make sure I had all of the Elm platform working together and got over the initial language speed bumps (“How do I compose functions again? Oh, << or >>, cool.” and so on).
Given the technical restrictions I had decided upon and my attitude towards the whole affair, I was fully prepared to do something on my own; very few people would want to learn a language they’d (likely) never heard of, in a style of programming they’d (likely) never used, with someone who didn’t want to stay up all night and didn’t care about winning.
The first night of the event (a Friday) was mostly spent just hanging out with the folks I knew (including giving a quick into to Haskell to one of them). Towards the end of the night, there was actually a group of folks on board with building out one of my ideas (the one I had “prototyped”) in Elm. More precisely, they were on board with me building the game in Elm and them doing everything else (^_^). I made it perfectly clear that I couldn’t even promise we’d have something deliverable by Sunday! I was pretty confident that we’d have something, but I’d never done a game before and never seriously worked in Elm, so I wasn’t about to have people depend on me to knock it out of the park in 24 hours. The crazy fools went along with me anyway. So we fleshed out the idea a bit and made it in theme for the event. Then we all went home around 10pm.
Started up the next day around 9-10am and quickly got to work. I spent a good amount of time, I think it was like 3-4 hours, getting the gameplay up to the point of my “prototype”, but of course in a more modularized/nicer fashion with a start screen that had buttons and such. The thing that took the longest was just reading the Elm docs about the “Elm Architecture” and trying to map the Mailbox/Address and Signal stuff into working code, threading the stuff through to the now separate Game module. By the end of Saturday, the basic gameplay was pretty much done, a lot of the themeing was in place – thanks to the other members of the team – and we were pretty happy. We all went home by 10-11pm.
Started Sunday again around 9am. We dropped in all the audio, tweaked some of the art, and just tried to polish the rest off. We were to deliver our game for the judge’s to play by noon. It wasn’t long after that the public started coming in and playing all the games. Of course it’s hard to just stop working on the thing, especially when Elm makes it hard to get something running that’s broken, so I kept pushing some updates after the “deadline” (with official approval) incorporating some of the early feedback we were getting. They were just minor things, a small progress bar across the top that gave a sense of how much of the conversation was left to listen to, a tip on the home screen on how to play, getting the game audio to restart on every new game instead of having to reload the app and a slight tweak to some colors. Around 2pm it was our turn pitch our game to the judges and around 4pm they got up and announced the winners for the Community and Judge’s Choice awardsWe ended up winning the Judge’s Choice, so that was neat.
, among other things. Then we all went home.
We haven’t done much with it since, though we do plan on making it better at some point. I’d like to add some localStorage support to store your scores and other state. In the mockups we had a richer “debriefing” section where you have to answer questions about key points in conversation to actually “win”, that would be neat to implement. More “levels”/situations/conversations would also be good. Having the ring wiggle to the actual sound wave of the conversation would be pretty sweet too, though that’s pretty much a pipe dream, dunno if I really want to dive into implementing that. If the Touch library was well supported in mobile browsers, we’d actually automatically have a mobile game as I made everything scalable from the start, so that would be nice to get figured out.
All in all it was pretty fun. All the code was done by me from scratch starting Saturday morning and the other guys did a great job making/collecting all the other assets and really making the game what it turned out to be. It really would have just been super simple geometric shapes and solid colors if I had done it myself. The atmosphere is what makes the game at all interesting to play and none of that was me.
All the other teams had some fun ideas too and I think everyone really enjoyed the event. If you’re interested, you can take a look at the code and give the game a try from the project page.