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Hey y'all, Kev here. I want to talk to you about how my team went about the creation of our first LD Jam collaboration, from conception to completion.

Of course I'm also hoping that you will play, enjoy and rate the game.

Brainstorming

One of our early concepts was to combine some of the possible interpretations of "A Small World", and to have anthropomorphised insects trying to climb the social ladder by making mutual acquaintances. The idea was a bit gameplay-light, and we struggled to find the toy inside the game, even though we all really enjoyed the concept itself.

We had all really enjoyed the idea of anthropomorphising little things, and we took it to an even smaller scale than insects: amoeba. In exploring what we liked about the social aspect of the first idea, we decided the most solid concept in there was that of "making friends". Thus Congamoaeba: The Amoebic Friendship Simulator was born.

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Look and feel

Nick did a full A4 page of little blobs with faces on and we almost immediately found our favourites - those with a little emoticon for a face and little more.

Nick and Gav worked together until we had something running in Unity that we were happy with.

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The language

We decided that our gameplay was to be a memory game, using language. To this end, we needed a language. This is where Will came into his element, creating a working language that only uses five different syllables:

Something we thought was very important was having real voices creating these sounds, so we all pitched in (and my Wife Kate too), to record verbalisations of these syllables, ending up with a player voice and four npc voices.

We decided that the player should be given some audio cues regarding the language, so Nick worked with Will to come up with some visual concepts that would reflect the meaning behind the syllables.

Nick's concepts for ways the language could be represented visually.

The conversation interface in-game.

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What didn't make it in

The main mechanic that we were hoping to make it into the game that we didn't have time to achieve was after a certain number of amoeba in the conga line, you would all merge and grow, and thus be able to talk to bigger NPC amoeba. Perhaps in version 2!

Thanks for reading, I hope it was interesting or insightful, now go play it!

If you have any comments, critiques, thoughts or suggestions, we'd love to hear them. Leave them on our games page or on this post - we'll read them all :grin: