A brief tutorial for our team's game, Panda Commando.

It's now Monday, a day after the Global Game Jam. The reality of what happened has sunk in and allowed me to post my thoughts.

We got our game up (such as it is). It can be downloaded at the official page.

We could (conceivably) of gotten the whole "redirecting arrows" gameplay mechanic into the game if we had remembered that the "3D cubes" thing wasn't anywhere near as important. Technically I kinda did remember (I wrote that programmer TODO list from Saturday morning that I mentioned in my last blog entry) and then I promptly forgot to check on it periodically. Oops.

So, what have we learned?

Global major game theme: Deception
Global minor game themes: a MAN, a PLAN, and a CANAL

Everyone was supposed to show up at 6am. The programmer that was tasked with implementing the 3D cube effect didn't show until 10am, and we didn't have his contact info. So, at 8:45, we decided to toss out the "3d-rolling-block" effect and change the blocks to be 2D "crate" objects that only have one real face. Always get everyone's MOST RELIABLE contact info at the very beginning of a project.

Global major game theme: Deception
Global minor game themes: a MAN, a PLAN, and a CANAL

It occurs to me that it was relatively easy last year to design a game based around a theme in the form of a phrase. (Last year's was "As long as we're together, we'll never run out of problems.") When you only have singular keywords for both major and minor themes, it's a lot harder to fit those themes because keywords too vague on their own without a more complex context.

Global major game theme: Deception
Global minor game themes: a MAN, a PLAN, and a CANAL

After the teambuilding session, we all took part in a brainstorming activity the intention of which was to present some game ideas that are remotely related to the desired themes, thus spawning more ideas from others.

Given these various ideas, everyone could start to build the design they would use for their final product.