Yesterday we organized Yet another Mini Game Jam in Berlin, and well – it was nothing short of awesome. 8 jammers, 5 of them the first time at one of our Jams, and everybody learnt something and enjoyed themselves. We even had (gasp!) working prototypes at the end: Raising the bar to 8-10 hours the best thing that could happen to us. It’s so much less stressful and easier to get something done that you can actually play. The ever friendly and helpful staff of the wonderful Café Osswald made the combination complete.
The first theme choosing resulted in a tie between “Catharsis”, “Side-effect” and “Colors”, with the latter winning the following vote.
This time I teamed up with Robert Bergner, a student who actually came from Magdeburg for our jam, with whom I also worked together this years Global Game Jam. And this is what we made, in about 9 hours including idea finding, plus a few minutes bugfixing afterwards:
“You” are the red-blue-yellow colorbuckets in the middle of the screen. You can steer freely with WASD. The other circles are the enemies – they can only walk on their color, and they will try go straight to you as far as possible. Your buckets have 10 shot each, and they get refilled if you touch their color. By clicking on the buckets and dragging in the direction of enemies, you can fire color projectiles at them, mixing their color or recoloring them. It works like this:
If you shoot a primary color enemy (red, blue, yellow) with one of your color projectiles, they mix:
If shoot a secondary color enemy (green, magenta, orange – highlighted by their white border) they simply get replaced:
Enemies which change color try to get to the next patch of their new color as fast as possible.
This way you can control the enemies – which is as far as we’ve come in our prototype at the jam. What we’ll add in later:
- Your goal: One of the color patches is the Collector Zone – you get points for luring enemies there. After a few enemies, the Collector Zone switches to another patch.
- A time limit
- Hit points: The enemies hurt you if they hit you, or maybe they even try to shoot at you!
- Better algorithms for the color patch distribution
So, here’s the jam prototype! Please comment if you find a bug or have some kind of suggestion!
edit: The newest prototype in development is accessible here!