I've determined that to get the concept I want done in 48 hours, I need to focus on audiovisual stuff immediately for the sake of morale.

There is an interview with David Crane I often refer to when it comes to discussing shipping stuff. It's about the Ghostbusters game he did in the early 80's for C64:

"Here’s a tip for game designers I like to call: ‘How to deal with a tight deadline.’ Complete a full game as quickly as possible, and then go back and enhance until they pry the code from your hands. After that, STOP adding features and only fix bugs, or you’ll simply fall victim to ‘creeping elegance’. Give your game a beginning, middle, and an end. If the code-release deadline comes and all you have is a fully playable and beautifully tweaked main game, all of your work is commercially worthless! That game can’t be released. Implement the complete game flow, from the time the player boots up until the final congratulations screen. Do this first, even if the fun part – the main gameplay sequence – is nothing but a placeholder. Second, make the game really fun but leave out neat little enhancements that might take a day or two to code. Then in the last weeks of a project, revisit each part of the sequence based on greatest need and add the cool little ideas that have been percolating in your brain. The result is that near the end of the allocated time you have an average, but complete game that has at least some commercial value even before it has all the coolest tweaks."

I don't plan to have a commercial game in 48 hours, but the beginning-middle-end then polish model is a good target, and it forces me to consider some of the biggest iterations up front before I build them. Game jams aren't school assignments - you can decide how finished "finished" is.

And so what I'll aim to have at the end of the day is a title screen, a placeholder gameplay screen, and a game over(It'll be one of those endless arcade game type deals).

To have a good title screen, I need to sort out some ideas about the setting and characters and graphic design. This is where "great artists steal" really comes into play: I can just cobble together a bunch of references and already know how they fit together and why, because I have that firm grounding in place.

This concept is very vaporwave, so it's gonna lean in on that and go straight in the direction of laser grids, airbrushed text, Deloreans, green/amber computer screens, but I can also take on a bit of 80's anime and have a "main girl" like Lum from Urusei Yatsura so that the car's driver isn't faceless. Characters have a lot of value for conveying "deep" concepts that need verbalization or body language. So while I probably won't develop this to the point where it's a story, it's a good value add.

Referring to our main concepts, she is some kind of sustainability nerd who wants to preserve the integrity of the hard drive. Since she's inside an "old" computer the main colors that come to mind are green/amber/grey, but that will ultimately be filtered through the limits of PICO-8, so I don't have to spend a lot of time on palettes. What about costuming?

Hackerman provides a decent starting point for "computer nerd" signals. But I also need indications for "driver".

Perhaps Evel Knievel? A cape is a nice touch.

But an important idea comes to mind now from working on these aesthetics: Our character is trying to compact space, rather than just going fast, which implies something like a monster truck crushing cars, versus a sports car or bike. This is the dividend of a coherent concept: you just end up with these obvious analogies falling out without trying very hard.

The U.S. doesn't have well-known cultural signals for "monster truck driver", specifically, but the vehicles themselves are unmissable, and I can use the more general "truck driver" for some costuming ideas. Working this out helps a lot with the gameplay since now it's clear that the player will be driving a big, tough truck that shoves and crushes, and the character will probably also be big and tough to match and use power poses and aggressive language, while still having some computer nerd flavor in there.

So now what about the adversaries? My initial thought is something like "runaway processes" - those classic pests of every computer user. But a slightly more coherent idea is to focus on a process that is itself "re-circulating" - like the Morris Worm.

The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988, was one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet. It was the first to gain significant mainstream media attention. It also resulted in the first felony conviction in the US under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.[1] It was written by a graduate student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, and launched on November 2, 1988 from the computer systems of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Maybe I could just put rtm's likeness in the game. That would probably be too much of an in-joke.

Alternately, we could lean on the monstrousness of giant worms.

Or, to borrow from anime a little more, tentacle monsters.

Cthulhu came up by chance while looking for a tentacle monster image. Also a good fit.

Now I have a pretty good idea of the gameplay. While you're circulating through the drive tracks, you are facing these monsters and you can "cut them off" in the classic Snake/Tron style. Coherency pays a dividend again, cause Tron is painfully vaporwave.

Now, there is still some issue with how exactly this works as gameplay if you are driving a slow monster truck instead of a speedy light cycle. I'm pretty sure the answer is "add weapons". And specifically, weapons of the type that will "clear up the mess" and free space on the hard drive.

When it comes to game mechanics, we start needing some more abstract or mathematical ideas. Computing ideas like compression, deduplication, caching, buffering, and filtering all come to mind as analogies. The truck is a compressor, but we also want some capability to remove the worms altogether.

I tapped out most of these ideas at Starbucks, then went to the gym and did 20 minutes on the stair climber and some stretches. Then I remembered that I wanted to fill in the musical component of the titles too while I'm out. I've been using a storage room space to do some recording and thought I would go there and take out my Casio to work up an idea and also sketch these visuals. So I got a banana and my third coffee of the day and headed over.

My first thought for themes is to start with the chords of something uplifting that already has lyrical content about sustainability: Men Without Hats, "In the 21st Century".

As I started up my recording workstation, an old EEE PC I realized that I didn't have a USB stick on me so I would have trouble taking the original recording home(it's a very "unplugged" place - no Wi-Fi, non-polarized power outlets. By sheer chance the EEE is OK with this). Fortunately I did have an old digital camera with a 32MB CompactFlash and an adapter, so I wasn't forced to record off my phone:

After a little fumbling around I have a starting place for chords and melody, where the melody has some accidentials to add a little bit of threatening edge. The final result will be shaped by PICO-8's tracker and might well turn out totally different. We shall see.

Now, visuals. This is one where I don't want to develop them with too much detail since they have to fit in a low resolution context. But I do want to solidify some of the designs and title screen composition:

I didn't quite get a composition together, but the designs feel close enough to run with. I really need to see what kind of scale works for PICO-8. To fix up the details I'll be working more closely from references once I'm back at the computer.

Its starting to come together I suppose. The animations are still a bit buggy, will fix

I have taken the first steps. It seems like i have made little progress, but as I am making my game nearly from scratch(I had made a very small and incomplete game engine before this particular jam) I am doing very well. It's going to be a Tetris type game, and that's all that has been done and will be told of as of yet. Good luck to any still jamming today!

Okay so it's already been 5 hours... What has been done so far ?

Getting an idea was a pretty simple task, I went for a sorta wrestling game where bits of the arena are destroyed as time passes. Your goal is just to defeat your opponent before running out of space. Otherwise, you'll both loose.

Gameplay wise, I did pretty much nothing really, I just scribbled a few gameplay rules I had in mind.

I gathered as much resources as I could get and need for this project and organized it in Unity 3D. Configured the animations for all my characters, made all the prefabs I needed for the arena and the props and here I am. All sprites and terrain tiles were taken from the free section of Game Art 2D.

So far, I'm quite satisfied with my idea, I think it can work pretty well if done correctly and if I have the time to implement everything I want.

I'm gonna start coding a few features for the game controller now before getting some rest.

Have a wonderful jam people !

I'm really having fun making these. Do I even need to make a game?

Here's a mockup of what I'm thinking. Gonna stop here for the night.

edit: shrank the image

I have a concept, I have a readme, I have a camera that can walk around and jump.

Seems like a good start to me. That done, it seems like it's time to go brainstorm some more (i.e. sleep).

Here's the mandatory screenshot of my amazingly complex test level:

Good luck to you all-night coders!

I'm trying to make a puzzle game, so i already have the basic controlls :'D

I made shooting and have the walls closing in. :100: :fire: :poop:

...but you dont want people to steal it because your whole idea involves being unique 😟

Well I will say this, my game is more of a narrative story...

Pardon the flat white textures, but the core idea of our game is in.

Essentially, it's a top-down shooter, but when you hit a wall part of the ceiling collapses, slowly running the player out of space to avoid enemy attacks.

The walls, they're moving!

This afternoon I decided to make a game where you try to clean junk out of outer space, to make way for future space travelers. I decided to make it like a classic Asteroids type game but with a twist. Like normal you can shoot asteroids, but you will also be able to suck them into a ship with a vacuum, or plow them into a different cargo ship.

What I've got so far is the engine for physics (still kinda buggy), I've got a ship and space junk to clean out, and a starry background. While I was at it I put in some Xbox Controller support as well, which is also kinda buggy.

Here's a screenshot from what I've got so far:

Almost 6 hours in, and I just finished a 2 minutes theme song that can loop (almost) :D The few LMMS tutorials that I watched today turned out to be useful. Still 0 line of code and no graphics though.

Six hours in, and I've got a good baseline for the rest of the game.

The goal is to collect ore and bring it back to your base to create a communication array. There will be other survivors and you need to carry around your base and scavenge for resources. A dust wall closes in, necessitating speed and bringing you into conflict with other scavengers.

Here is my first pic. Yes I'm a solo participant and I'm NOT an artist^^. Want to get rid of all the graphical part before starting the code.

The game is about setting a tribe in a new place, hum, I'm guessing they ran out of space in their previous location. A decision making game about how your tribe is gonna to evolve: Agriculture or cannibalism? Worship you ancestors or Cthulhu? Just hope that I can finish it at time.

Title: Dementia Mythos

Genre: Third Person Adventure

Story: It is about a man whos telling a story from his childhood, which affects the gameplay. When you complete a map, it all starts over again. But here's the thing, he has aged each time he retells it, and things change, get hazy or just disappears, which then again changes the gameplay and map.

What we have so far:

In progress whiteboxed map, and also a working character controller.

Character.

A theme song and some sounds.

Hope it's going good for the rest of ya :D

Went to eat dinner, then came back and implemented this little status bar that shows which shapes you're trying to make.

It doesn't look so good compressed to a 256-color GIF, though. ;P