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Well its been a hectic 48 hours... but its finally over.  Myself, Brandon and Dan and a few friends competed in the 2010 Global Game Jam over this weekend. Over the past 2 days we built an entire game from scratch for the competition. 

The rules were simple:

1.) You have 48 hours to build your game.

2.) You have to build your game around the theme of "deception".

3.) You must use one of three constraints in your game: "rain", "plain" or "spain".

An odd set of conditions to be sure, but the Global Game Jam is no ordinary competition.  It's a world wide event that over two days had over 900 games submitted from over 30 countries!  Thats a lot of game development, and thats the whole point. The whole point of this event is in the next 48 hours is to build a game that will change how people feel about games (hopefully for the good).  Thats a big goal, which is why the event is so big!  We have thousands of developers building hundereds of games, the idea is that a few will be a type of game we haven't seen yet.  Or at least is something that puts a new twist on something more common.

Check out Eric Hardman's article about the game Jam for Gamasutra, also thanks for the below pics of the Game Jam. 

Left, Wild Pockets Team working; right, the Entertainment Techology Center, host for the Pittsburgh regions event.

With that in mind we built a game that we thought was very "different" from anything we tried before.  To be honest its tricky at this point to pick apart how we came to the all the choices that led up to our final game.  But amid the blaze of rapid development that paved the way for Dr. Laser we made some early design choices that ultimately made the game truely unique:We want to make a game where the deception was a player's choice not an enemies programming.

1.) Deception is the player's mechanic not the enemies.  We didn't want the game to be about the game decieving the player anything like that, ultimately we decided the deception element would be more of a part of the story than anything else.

2.) Story and game play connention.  We wanted the game play to ultimately effect the outcome of the story in way that the player would want to play through again to see different outcomes.  In the end we decided on a "good end"/"bad end" system that allows two endings for "chapters" of the story, while still allowing the player to progress to the next chapter.  Later on it became obvious that we were making a "story" game for a game jam, a massive task in itself, that I'm proud to say we succeeded with.

3.) Make it look and feel like something unique.  The end look of the game is very distinct, Brandon is mostly to thank for that.  But there are also things like the unified look of the 2D and 3D art that also make this work.  Also we made very powerful action momments when the game shifts from cutscene to gameplay modes.  Some of this is audio, but also things like removing the hud from the game during game play help this.

In the end we finished the jam with something we're really proud of.  Check out Dr. Laser! Adorara Ella un Robot? (Dr. Laser! Will She love a Robot?), and you will learn of a robots struggle to integrate with human society.  You see Dr. Laser is a robot and as such is well versed in how to destroy humanity.  But he is also in love, and through this confusion he has gained a tiny bit of "compasion" programming in his robotic brain.  You actually play as this bit of compassion, fighting off his other violent robotic instincts inside Dr. Laser's brain. However, Dr. Laser is being forced to his limit by the strain of attempting to suppress his robot senses, now his partner wants to introduce him to her family.  With the strain at the breaking point you must do everything in your power to make sure everything goes 'swimmingly'.

And the game is in Spanish... yeah... constraints...sorry to anyone who can't read Spanish!  Also double appology to those that can... yeah...

So yeah, thanks for all your support and definately let us know if you like the game.  There will likely be a follow up blog post about the Wild Pockets to Javascript communication we used to get the flash animations timed up with the game play, so look forward to that as well!

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