(Click here for day 1)
Day 2 of ludum dare 29 is now over, and we (Christina Lewis, Benjamin Benjaminsen, Tormod Berge and now Martin Kvale) have made a functioning game! It's not quite polished, but it has mechanics and art, and we are pretty happy about that. Download is here: Fishy Business, ludum dare 29
We all collectively forgot about the good ideas we had for names, and a decision had to be made, I attempted to make some sort of pun involving deep/ depression / fishing for compliments, but it was not to be. Growing impatient and the day ending, I went home and my dear coworkers went for the opportunity and named it "Fishy Business"
Benjamin finished the game's programming, and we were extremely lucky to have Martin Kvale of Krillbite Studio making some music for us! (They made Among the sleep you know)
I would like to say that our game was super deep and well thought trough, but in the end we had more of a "something something emotions as physical landscape" "something something metaphor" as a general direction. In the end, we had fun, we (probably) learned things, and I enjoyed working together with everyone.
(I will see about making some sort of video showcasing the game, I will have to figure out how first, in the mean time, you can download it up top.)
Skyfish out!
I am participating in Ludum Dare 29!
(As of writing, that is today and tomorrow)
This time's theme is "below the surface". My game jam sort of began a day in advance, spending the evening troubleshooting various problems with my laptop. In the end I got some help to get twitch streaming working, (but of course I forgot all about streaming when the game jam really came) At 8:00 this morning I promptly awoke on my own, checked the theme, and dreamily wrote down some obscure and confusing words into my smartphone before falling asleep for another hour:
Insects topsoil
Fungus network
Educatinal game about cells, clorofyll
Underwatet drama
My fish jump game
Something largr and looming on hook.
A persons emotions
A persons thoughts
A game about erradocating depressive thoughts from The mind, black sketchystuff, use erasing motion and gun play to kill sketchystuff.
A game about learning to swim
Drowning in everyday life; 2D sink or swim in city landscape with business men floating up and elaborate creatures eating people floating while normal life resumes below.
Man hiding in bath refill foam and water to not be embarrassed
-surface of a problem
Some hours later I arrived at Local Oslo hackerspace: Bitraf and met two strangers who had agreed to make games with me the evening prior. These people consisted of Benjamin Benjaminsen and Tormod Berge We presented our thoughts/ideas/associations, and like last time, my ideas struck fancy with my new friends and the idea we picked were the following:
"Drowning in everyday life; 2D sink or swim in city landscape with business men floating up and elaborate creatures eating people floating while normal life resumes below."
The current state of my work on this game can be seen below, I am trying to create an underwater-sort-of scene with skyscrapers, people and fish, but the buildings and fish will be provided by the 3D guy while I work on the overall mood and make sure the end result doesn't look like we threw a bunch of very different assets together. Trying to capture the pallette I had in mind is being annoyingly difficult, I wand a grim, miserable, depth, deep feeling, but without the planned paralax effect the depth doesn't really kick in like I imagine, having to rely on colours alone.
In afterthrought I'm not sure if it really makes sense anymore. It's quite literally "below the surface" and I imagine many other Ludum Dare entries will be set underwater, but I really like the idea of these business people stuck in the rat race feeling "below" in this metaphor of emotion as a strange underwater landscape with ominous fish in it. We/I are primarily operating on instinct with the metaphorical part, playing around with whether or not the people should float up, sink down, escape, be saved, be eaten, avoid the fish, get eaten by the fish, or if the fish are background elements.
Check in tomorrow to see how far we get, we have only scheduled these two days to work on it ;)
