So... Caracas Game Jam, this year it was on a different university and my friends (who were also my team) and I were all excited about this, the event happened last weekend so it was kinda in the middle of EVERYTHING we had to do like homework, study and all that university stuff.... but even so we went!
A while after we arrived we went to the auditorium where we were going to spend a few hours listening to some important people, talk about the problems with the recent law about video games here at Venezuela and last but not least, this year's keynote speech :). I must say I am amazed by how relaxed we were at the jam, last year we were so nervous thinking we could never finish the game on time and stuff like that and this year we were like "I know I'll manage to make the game in 48 hours so I'm not going to spend time worrying about this", we could see the difference with our newest member (he's a guy that studies at our university and went to the jam alone and well, one thing led to another and he ended up on our team) because he was really worried about this time issue .
We went a bit overtime with the speeches (fed the newcomer's fears! YEAAAH!!) and so we finished watching the keynote a bit late, then we moved to the classrooms where we were going to stay the whole weekend, and at first we had mayor power issues and the fact that none of us could access the Internet, but like 2 hours later the problem was solved thanks to the fantastic staff! yay!.
THIS YEAR'S THEME IS SO FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
Ouroboros.
"What? an image? not a word? seriously?" those were my thoughts when they showed it to us. My opinion is that since a word is way more concrete than an image it is kinda easier to use but... this is an image, I mean, how many things can you tell me about that image? exactly, you can't count them! And that's how my team spent it's first 5 hours of the game jam :D hitting our faces against the wall to come up with an idea related to this image that would be a good game.
Let me explain a bit how our brainstorm worked: we wrote on a board all the words that each of us related to that picture of Ouroboros, cool, no problem there, then we started to mix those words into more tangible things, like ideas of games, and when we had enough we started to vote for the one we liked the most. It took us approximately 3 hours to do this, and when we finished we ended up with 3 ideas, then we decided to work on each of them to see their pros a cons. After we did that, we called a friend of us to help us with his opinion about the ideas (he's the person that guided and worked with us in the last game jam, he knows a lot about game design so he was like our teacher that last year, and believe me, we learned so freaking much that first game jam) and his opinion was: this won't do. Just as easy as that, our dreams and hopes shattered while we watched pieces of our effort crumble into the abyss of desperation and meaninglessness!! Anyway... we started over, we had absolutely no idea what to do, our brains were just out of juice, we were spitting any idea that would dare to cross our desolated former-creative mind. After a lot of crazy stuff, we decided to go back to the game that wasn't good enough and decided to make it good enough! Just as simple as that... you like it but it's not going to work? MAKE IT WORK! And so we did and ended up with the idea that would give birth to our game: Nom.
Finally! an idea we could work with! and let me take this moment to give details about our decision: This game was intended to be infinite, since that one of the things that Ouroboros represents, it was also... well... a giant snake eating its own tail (you see the similarity with the picture? not everyone can. Hint: it's a snake eating its own tail). But that just isn't enough, if we had settled with this we would've just made a super mario clone or something like that, it just wasn't original. But we kept going and we added this need run from the snake (at this point the player was intended to be the stick figure) by using some sort of items that would appear as the player advanced though the snake's tail. In the end we decided to turn the stick figure into the bad guy and the snake into the player, and this turned out to be a lot fresher and fun, the players will feel identified with the stick figure since it has a human form, so we did have to make some kind of tutorial to let the player know that he was trying to eat the stick figure.
One last thing, I'm sure you must be wondering what the hell is going on in the game, "why is the guy running?" , "why... WHY IS THE SNAKE EATING ITSELF?!", "why can't I think of another fun quote?!". Well, here is the answer: The stick figure is called cliché, because it represents what a cliché is (very monotonous and boring), and the snake represents creativity (very colourful and not..... boring), so the stick figure is running because it wants to get to the head of the snake and kill it, why is that? Think for a second what happens when you try to create something, you will be inevitably drawn to an idea that is similar to something that already exists, this is the cliché and it represents no effort at all to invent something new (if in the game you stop trying to win, the cliché will win, which is a pretty good metaphor to represent what happens in our brains when we are just lazy to think outside the box), now, on the other hand you have the snake (you've probably already gotten the point of this, but I'm going to explain this anyway because my friend came up with this what-the-hell-are-you-smoking idea and I think it fits the game theme so frkn much that I must finish this paragraph or else/0) which represents the creativity, when you put all your efforts on being creative and really thinking of something completely unusual and different (represented here by an infinite barrage of letters that will just keep coming no matter what you do and you will inevitably lose unless you play on "noob" mode because somebody forgot to balance the difficulty on the "human" mode to make it... winnable) you eat the cliché and the creativity persists... making you.... creative... I mean creative creative not my creative.
Wow, long entry AND ITS GOING TO BE LONGER, nah just kidding, just gonna post a few pictures of the drafts we made while making the art of the game.
One more thing! my team was amazing! and I loved the art of the game :D pretty cool dontcha think?
C yas!
