Hi all,
I’m one of the developers behind G.A.M.E, created for this month’s Jam. We were a team of 3, spread out across the world and with an urge to sleep make a cool game. After seeing the theme announced, we bounced concepts back and forth until one stuck – this concept was one that resonated with us as developers and gamers – that you would play as the head of a large games company, a-la EA, and work to instruct the creation of the game without much of a care for those that played it.
We took inspiration from Papers, Please, creating a similar (we hope!) area of play, where you go about your job with messages coming to interact with you rather than you going to interact with anything. We came up with a quick messaging system for some quirky humour and interaction from your employees, and later expanded the system to include the main gameplay – the proposition system.
This was a system which required you to make split second decisions, and one which we decided was necessary to be as hectic as possible, to make it both a more challenging experience and to stop these propositions clogging up the screen too much. We created an extensive system of many results and reactions, and let the timer decide if it ran out. We linked these to a number of variables, such as your current income, profits, expenses, employees, fans, etc. We then decided that each game would take 7 days to create, and some results would increase or decrease that time, such as fixing bugs or moving office.
It was at this point we realised some further player interaction would be necessary, so we created Floppy, our version of ‘Clippy’, who ended up with a few chains of dialog explaining the systems of the game and getting angry at you when you attempted to quit. We had bigger plans for Floppy, including a rough sketch of an actual story that he would be involved in, yet as is always the case with Ludum Dare, that was not to be in 72 hours. After about 68 hours we had created a game with a mixture of cookie clicker and papers, please gameplay mechanics, with graphics which we were pleased with and some (unfortunately) minimal annoying background sounds to make you feel like you were truly in an office. The hectic nature lent itself well to our interpretation of the theme, leading you to not actually care too much. A quick leaderboard system to drive players and we created something that was enjoyable to play for us, however we must admit it lacked replayability.
tl;dr We are happy with our final product, however it misses our planned story and probably gets annoying after a while.
And of course, if you’d like to check it out, go here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57508 it would of course be much appreciated!
-FlamingKiwi
