My goal for the year, while I have a job that comfortably pays the bills and allows for 3+ days off a week, is to participate in as many game jams as I can. TWoA2 came at just the right time!

I'm not part of a team, so I'll be doing all the development myself. I'll be using GameMaker Studio, Paint.NET, the Indie Graphics Builder image library, and Audacity and Reason for audio; and if I have time, I'd love to learn how to integrate Spine animations into GMS.

These first two days I've been at my job and unable to do much coding, so I've been thinking about the theme and designing instead. The theme for this particular game jam is "The Toys Are Alive!" At first this sounded ominous, but after reading Wikipedia's definition of "toy," I decided that the exclamation point was part of an advertisement. I figure that for a toy to be alive, it must still be a toy, and retain some of its toy-ness; a toy that becomes something else is no longer a toy. So, I decided that for the purposes of my game, a toy helps to prepare children to be a part of society.

Sidenote: I may be biting off way more than I can chew. Certainly I don't have enough time in the next 5 days to put everything into this game that I've come up with. Hopefully, I'll be able to finish enough for a fun proof-of-concept.

The game is tentatively called "Docent 314," because you play the part of a giant spider-like toy robot that is essentially a somewhat indirect teacher, and because "The Docent" sounded a bit too Fifty-Shades-of-Grey. The gameplay will be reminiscent of a tower defense game, however, instead of placing gun turrets to halt the enemy's advance, you'll be placing toys that will help the advancing children's development. If that doesn't make any sense, well... hopefully it will by the time I have something to show you. 0:)


Here is a sketch of the player's giant spider-like eye-and-grabbers, which we'll probably never see in-game.


A few thoughts about what the other toys might look like.

So far I have a majority of the basic game framework -- navigating the different main game states, interacting with the player, etc -- and a grasp of the basic concepts needed for the features I'd like to include. I haven't done any pathfinding with GameMaker before, so that should be interesting. Tomorrow I have a full day to work on the game, I hope to have the majority of the code that doesn't involve interaction between game elements done, and enough element interaction to prove that it's worth moving forward.

To those of you who are also part of the game jam, good luck on your projects!