NMS 2018

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:

  • Cosmic
  • Friendship
  • You are the boss

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.