My wife will be out of town this weekend and I’ve got three kids, 8 and under, so I won’t be able sequester myself for 48 hours of bleary-eyed programming. Instead, I thought maybe I’d try getting the kids in on the action! My plan is to do some preliminary planning and setup once the theme is announced (after the kids go to bed Friday night). Then during the day Saturday, the kids and I will work on the “creative” aspects of the game: art, levels, sounds, music. Finally, once they’re back in bed at the end of the day, I’ll spend Saturday night assembling all of their contributions into the final game.

I pulled off a similar plan last year for the Fantastic Arcade Game Jam, and the result was a delightful iPad game that my kids really enjoy playing. It’s like an interactive drawing of theirs. Hoping I can achieve the same against this year.

So, yeah, consider this my “I’m in” statement!

• Planning on using the Phaser library.
• No server-side component, so the published game will just be deployed as a static site, on S3 probably.
• Will be using Sublime Text for all my text editing needs.
• Will probably end up using Photoshop, but would like to push myself to use Acorn or Pixelmator or Sketch, even though I’ll be clumsier in those (not knowing keyboard shortcuts, etc.).
• Will certainly use Audacity for minor audio editing, and if we get around to music, probably Garageband.
• The kids still do best drawing on paper, so I’ll use my trusty scanner to capture everything, or maybe even my iPhone camera, depending on how fast and loose we are with the artwork.
• I don’t have a real microphone, so any audio will be recorded with my laptop’s mic or my phone’s.

And I guess if I do a game with the kids that puts us in the Jam category (because we’re a team!). And gives me an extra 24 hours to hammer out any technical issues, or get additional art from the kiddos.

I’ll be honest: if the theme for the compo is tempting enough, I may just decide to do the compo and put the kiddos in front of the TV Saturday while I work on my own project!