The Magic Pantry

Another Perth Game Jam has come and gone, and what a huge bag of fun it was too! The mighty Simon Wittber once again outdid himself, making a fantastic venue available for the 20-or-so participants, who banded together to hack up nine games from nothingness over a period of 45 hours or thereabouts.

For me, this event was totally different to the Global Game Jam held earlier in the year. Due to the lack of other sites around the globe, I wasn’t spurred on by a sense of competition. It was more a case of manufacturing inspiration and enthusiasm by surrounding yourself with like-minded people and imposing constraints in the form of a deadline, a theme, and a “significant asset”. Also, the non-presence of that Louis Castle douchbag removed hate as a motivating factor, so I wasn’t keen to develop an evil game with Louis as the antagonist, as I did for GGJ.

Mr. Wittber chose to announce the theme and significant asset well in advance of the jam, giving everyone ample time to think about what they wanted to do. This was a great decision, as the amount of dithering about was reduced almost to zero, replaced with interesting discussions about several really promising game concepts. I went into January’s Global Game Jam wanting to make a flash-based game, which I’d never attempted before, and I used the time to learn how to write a game in ActionScript, using the FlashPunk framework, from scratch. This time, I knew I wanted to create a fluid simulation, similar to this one. I was pretty happy when I found out that the significant asset was a bubble, because that fitted what I wanted to achieve. As for the theme of “choose two at the expense of the other”, my first thought was the old project management adage “cost, quality, time: choose any two”. Kudos to Simon for choosing a much, much better theme than GGJ2010.

During the pre-Jam BBQ (during which Simon proudly revealed his massive cheese kransky, which both honoured and humbled me), I discussed two concepts with Jack, Nick et al.:

1. A resource management game called Gusher, whereby you send out geologists to explore land and sea, them choose a suitable spot to drill an exploratory hole, then build an oil rig to extract the crude, then refine it, store it to manipulate the market, then pipe or ship it to sell. You’d need to manipulate the media and the authorities, and there’d always be the chance of an incident (either deliberate or accidental). Each choice would allow you to fix two of the three cost, time and quality constraints, so, for instance, you would get an inaccurate report of where to drill if you sent your geologists out on a tight deadline and didn’t pay them very much.
2. A fishing game called Floater where you paddle your wooden boat across a turbulent ocean, choosing to stop and fish, bail out your vessel or move it left and right (only being able to do two of these things at a time).

After I began coding, I quickly realised that the fluid simulation would take a long time to code, and wouldn’t run at a decent framerate in Flash (I coded up a quick demo in C++ and in Flash, both using Box2D, to find big performance hits with more than 100 physics objects at once in Flash). So I started doing a little bubble simulation instead, using Box2D’s built-in support for buoyancy. This quickly led to an idea of a chef cooking a pot of soup on the stove, with ingredients being thrown in to raise the water level, and a game mechanic of merging like-coloured bubbles both to increase score (the deliciousness of the stock) and decrease heat (hence reducing the likelihood of losing an ingredient due to the intensity of bubbling, which would be the lose condition).

This worked out pretty well. Jack helped out with the graphics and playtesting, and the game mechanic came together nicely. You can have a go yerself on the RocketHands web site. Comments and feedback welcomed!

So what now? As I mentioned to Jack, Simon, Anthony and others at the end of the Jam, I treated things this time around as a great way of getting started on a project, rather than as a great way of finishing something off. So I plan to keep working on the soup-making game, which I’ve called Gusher2, until it’s at a point where I’m happy with it. With that in mind, here’s my to-do list:

• Ask Simon Boxer to draw some lewd cartoonish graphics, inspired by Muscle March. We need an attract screen, the main game screen in the same style, a win screen, a lose screen, and five distinct ingredients (celery, tomato, carrot, onion and kransky sausage).
• Add an egg-timer, and constrain playtime to 3 minutes, with a new ingredient going in every 30 seconds.
• Make the ingredients change the water level when they go in, and change the tint and alpha of the stock, to ramp up the level of difficulty as the game progresses.
• Display the current score somewhere on screen, and tweak the scoring mechanism to favour multi-merges.
• Continue to improve the game mechanic. Some playtesters have said they’d prefer to click on bubbles, rather than click-and-drag. So I’ll try that out.
• Animate some fire under the pot, some particles in the stock, some steam on top of it and so on.
• Add suitable sound effects, musical stings and… voice acting. Oh yeah: “My soup… she’s a-ready!”

After all that, I’m going to perform an experiment with online flash games:

1. Integrate with mochimedia. to experiment with in-game advertising as a revenue stream, to get analytics information, to keep online high scores, and so forth. Did I mention I want 5 different win screens, depending on whether you’re the top scorer, in the top 10%, and so on?
2. Integrate with Kongregate, to do much the same thing with a different API (mochimedia and Kongregate have an agreement to stay off each other’s turf, so to properly experiment you need to do both).

I’m hoping that integration with these services will increase re-playability. After all, competing with members of your social network for high scores seems to work. I’d like to give it a shot.

I want to get all of this done in the next four weeks. I’m working on three other projects. I have two small children. I’m building a house. We’ll see how it goes!