Found some time today to tweak and explore this prototype a bit more today. Looking much better if I may say so myself, and is much closer to what I imagined from a game system perspective. :)
Except for having tweaked visuals into a more coherent and attractive look and fixing bugs plus expanded on schedule functionality, the environment is much more like the real deal now. I have been basing a height map off a real map.
So the jam is over, but (especially given didn’t finish) the game i still twirling around in my head. We returned from Malmö to the island where I grew up and also the area I tried to create a simulation of during the jam.
Circumstances led to me visiting the new camping reception of where I once had a summer job as a kid. There I found a camping map, showing all the trailer and tent sites on the camping, a very similar map to what I used to show visitors back in the day. I took a picture as reference for the game. ;)
NMS is over, but it was great! I spent a lot of time enjoying the amazing weather, eating good food and taking strolls in beautiful venues with the little family. I also got to hang out with some great game creators and got some decent hours into tinkering with my emergent murder mystery game. I named it “Cosmic Fates” and was soooo close to get the final core mechanics in ahead of the final submission time. Didn’t quite get there though, I blame this and lots of stolen content for scoring last place in the “goodness” based popular vote rating. :)
Jam page: No More Sweden 2018 at itch.io
Submission page: Cosmic Fates
Back at STPLN in Malmö, Sweden, and excited as always for this annual event; the game jam No More Sweden. This year I brought my family for a weekend vacation in the this, the third largest city of the country. As a result, jamming may come in second when prioritizing my time, but that’s fine as I’m mostly here to have fun.
I held a little talk, praising cardboard as a building material with my experiences from building and organizing the jams around Virtual Böj and Pick a Boog and there were also other participants holding great talks. For instance I was really happy to learn that Hempuli is the creator of BaBa is You, a really cool game I got word of somewhere on the Internet.
Anyhow, as per usual we wrote and drew inspirational cards at the beginning of the jam. I got:
Since I knew I wouldn’t be able to spend more than half time on the jam I decided to work alone if an exceptional opportunity did not appear, I ended up working solo. I came to the jam with an idea of wanting to building something around simulation and emergent agent behavior, somewhat similar to what we did in TRIBE 2020. The idea quickly manifested as being a game where the player would overlook a camping site and its agent based inhabitants, being able to take direct control over a camper. Two campers would become “cosmic friends”, not knowing each other but sharing the same daily routines and attributes and one camper would become a murderer. The goal of the game, except for providing me with a case to fiddle with emergent behaviors, would be to unite the cosmic friends before the murderer takes out one of them.