I want to make something different. Not a conventional video game, moving a player around on screen, shooting, jumping, etc. Something more akin to Twine, but not strictly a hypertext. A bit of stateful logic never hurt anyone. I’m guessing something more, structurally, like a management sim. You know, something with a dashboard of information that the player can dig down into and manipulate. Exploration in a form similar to surfing the web or browsing Facebook.

I don’t know, I’ll probably end up not making anything. Out of the 48 hours of the compo I can’t imagine I’d get more than 4 or 5 good, quality hours of work in.

Is under the sea too obvious of a take on Beneath the Surface? I think there’s a real shortage of water-themed games, to be honest. Even in this day and age of advanced tech the ocean is still way huge, too big to explore, and contains lots and lots of unknowns. It’s basically space. But any joe in a boat can drift out into it. Heavy.

Thinking of doing a 20k leagues under the sea thing, with the player exploring around in their nautilus sub having adventures. Yeah.

My wife will be out of town this weekend and I’ve got three kids, 8 and under, so I won’t be able sequester myself for 48 hours of bleary-eyed programming. Instead, I thought maybe I’d try getting the kids in on the action! My plan is to do some preliminary planning and setup once the theme is announced (after the kids go to bed Friday night). Then during the day Saturday, the kids and I will work on the “creative” aspects of the game: art, levels, sounds, music. Finally, once they’re back in bed at the end of the day, I’ll spend Saturday night assembling all of their contributions into the final game.

I pulled off a similar plan last year for the Fantastic Arcade Game Jam, and the result was a delightful iPad game that my kids really enjoy playing. It’s like an interactive drawing of theirs. Hoping I can achieve the same against this year.

So, yeah, consider this my “I’m in” statement!

• Planning on using the Phaser library.
• No server-side component, so the published game will just be deployed as a static site, on S3 probably.
• Will be using Sublime Text for all my text editing needs.
• Will probably end up using Photoshop, but would like to push myself to use Acorn or Pixelmator or Sketch, even though I’ll be clumsier in those (not knowing keyboard shortcuts, etc.).
• Will certainly use Audacity for minor audio editing, and if we get around to music, probably Garageband.
• The kids still do best drawing on paper, so I’ll use my trusty scanner to capture everything, or maybe even my iPhone camera, depending on how fast and loose we are with the artwork.
• I don’t have a real microphone, so any audio will be recorded with my laptop’s mic or my phone’s.

And I guess if I do a game with the kids that puts us in the Jam category (because we’re a team!). And gives me an extra 24 hours to hammer out any technical issues, or get additional art from the kiddos.

I’ll be honest: if the theme for the compo is tempting enough, I may just decide to do the compo and put the kiddos in front of the TV Saturday while I work on my own project!

Entire game in one screen? That’s fantastic. I’m guessing the *spirit* of the theme is that the one screen is not used for panning across a larger map or showing different dialogs, etc. I’m also guessing that randomly generating the level (for example) for each new play session would be okay?

Not terribly original, I’m sure, but what I’m thinking right now is a turn-based strategy game, maybe something roguelike, with a single screen map (slightly smaller than a single screen because you need some HUD and controls). Would really love to make something with Phaser/HTML5, and have it work on desktop and iPad (I won’t worry about it being playable on an iPhone as far as screen size goes).

First, I’m going to do a bit of looking around at how others are interpreting the theme… very curious as to where we’re collectively drawing the line on what counts as “one screen”.