Beatventures, that's a nice name isn't it? It's the name of the game my team made at the CGJ2013, but first of all I must talk about the theme.
Last years theme was an image of Ouroboros, and we had areally hard time figuring out what to make of it (if you want to read more about that, here's the post). This year... well... it wasn't even something visible, it was a sound, a heartbeat to be precise, and obviously the first thing in everyone's mind was this:
Well, a heart, you can do great deal of stuff with a heart as a premise, sure you can. So we started our painful process of figuring out what the hell to do with our game, should the player be a heart? should the player defend the heart? We thought of many things, we even thought of doing a beat-em-up where you are the heart and fight food that is bad for the heart, like fries, hamburgers, etc, I honestly loved that idea because it was hilarious, but it was a heart and our team wanted a more abstract aproach to the theme than just playing a heart, if possible we wanted no heart to be present in the game at all.
The hours passed, food eaten, drank unhealthy amounts of coke, and then drank more coke and coffee too! the usual thing. Talking about usual, our team was spending a really long time thinking about what the game should be, which is something we seem to love too much. We were throwing random ideas on the board, going back and forth between old and new ideas, we were getting kinda desperate, at least some of us.
We were stuck, we were making no progress, so I went out of the room to get some water, and do my usual walking & thinking (just so you know, my mind seems to work 300% better when I'm walking and talking to myself), and did that for around 10 minutes, trying to go back to square one and think of a new idea from there. I thought about a character in a maze looking for something, and the closer he got to that something the faster his heart would beat, so I went back into the room where my team was and talked to them about that. We spinned the idea around a bit but in the end it was no good, althought part of it seemed to mix with the other ideas we had.
In the end, just like always, after hours and hours and HOURS of discussing (and drinking coffee and coke, of course) what the game should be, we all finally got to the same place, and decided to make a rythm game. I'm sure the whole team loved the idea.
The game had this nice mechanic, were you could only move if you were in synch with the beat of the song playing. Fantastic, I'm in love with that idea, and even more with the idea of mixing that with a top-down game where you usually have free control over your movement.
Relieved that we finally could start working at around 3 or 4 am, we began to do our jobs. This time, we had split the tasks nicely, we had one person dedicated exclusively to the music (which was hella important, rythm game remember?), other dedicated to the art and the rest of the team (three) to programming. Yikes we are finally making this game happen!!!!
Along the way we met a friend that had been present the last jam, and although he wasn't participating, he dedicated a lot of his time there helping with the art assets and teaching our artist, so by the end of the jam we actually had 2 artists.... YAY! FRIENDSHIP!!!
Ahem, anyways, near the end of the jam we were stressed, screaming "WHY WON'T YOU WORK?! WHYY?!", hitting the keyboard with our faces, it was a pretty rough moment... Well honestly it wasn't like that, but try to imagine that happening in everyone's head at the same time... Actually, that's a lot closer to reality now that I think about it.
THE JAME ENDED!!! WOHOOOO!!! WE MADE A GAME IN ONLY 48 HOURS!!! MWAHAHAHAHA!! I admit it always feel like that, which is awesome because, well... it is.
Our team, Origames, made Beatventures.
All the other games were really cool and I really loved what people made just from a heartbeat. I must mention that this jam was huge for us, we had around 67 people in the end participating out of 70, we were almost full! and 18 games were made!! That is plain AWESOME, the people involved in making this happen are just AMAZING :)
Thanks for reading, go make games will ya?
