Saturday 8pm (Sydney Time)
Well we’re underway with the serious part of the Game Jam now. Our theme was decided in the final voting rounds last night and the team took the night to think on it before convening this morning for a brainstorming session.
After a bit of discussion around how the concept of Unknown Language can work, we started to zero in on an idea. Like many people, our first thoughts were of a dynamic similar to No Man’s Sky where a player would have to uncover additional pieces of a language as they explore, to make the unknown, known. However, as anyone who has studied a language knows, that’s a huge amount of work to try and include in a 72 hour game jam.
So we set that idea aside and talked about other scenarios. We quickly agreed that the idea of waking up in a foreign country where your language isn’t dominant, or even prominent, would be an intense experience and provide for some interesting interactions. When you can’t speak with someone, can’t ready anything, when you have to rely on basic gestures and goodwill, how does that change your behaviour? You can see some of our basic thoughts from our whiteboard meeting below.
Once we’d decided on a setup it was time to get started on the core functionality and objects we’d need for this idea to grow into a game. We reset the old Trello board and added a bunch of new cards.
Here are some screenshots and animations of our progress so far!
Graham and Jase got quickly to work on setting up basic interactions and elements.
Emurga jumped straight into character design and asset development.
While all this was going on, Dan worked on mapping out a plot outline and writing some basic intros and interstitial scenes for in-game progress.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by a stream and spent time with us! We’ll be back on Sunday morning to continue!
