Global Game Jam: Day 1

And we're off! I meant to write this last night but the beginning of today is good enough.

After watching the keynote and getting our theme, we started discussing game designs. Our theme this year is "extinction," which leads to several obvious routes. Two obvious ones are "everyone is [going] extinct and you have to prevent/solve it" and "make [insert species here] extinct." There's also the psychological definition which is to make a certain behavior extinct by gradually removing positive reinforcement to a stimulus or giving negative feedback to a stimulus that was once positive. Our group decided to do a combination of both the biological and psychological definitions in one; a sort of double-extinction.

The basis of our game is that the player is told that they are to make a species extinct while our game design [hopefully] makes a certain behavior of theirs (collecting coins, for example) extinct at the same time without them noticing. After throwing ideas back and forth we decided that our game would be a platformer that consists of a vengeful man in a dinosaur suit (dino-Batman, as he is currently being called) who travels back in time to kill all the dodo birds, one of which who traveled forward in time and killed his parents. The player will be told to kill all the dodo birds and presented the option to collect dodo bird eggs, which make tasty omlettes. Ultimately, the player will be killing dodo birds and forgetting/subconsciously choosing not to collect eggs.

Our current plan is to do a little research into the psychology behind extinction so that we can successfully implement it in our game. The platformer "game" part that the player sees and comprehends as the full game is fairly straightforward. It's a basic platformer with movement and jumping, enemies, and hopefully bosses. The player can jump on dodo birds to kill them and can only progress when all the dodos in an area are killed. Levels will be broken up by highly-characterized bosses that will be entertaining and fun. Dodo eggs will be placed in easily accessible areas but not right in the player's path. There will be environmental hazards like death pits and potentially one other that the player should avoid. The game will keep track of score as an aesthetic classic game feature, but lives will be infinite. The art style will be happy and colorful, and also somewhat comic. Our hope is that the game will be silly and fun enough that the player will keep playing until the end, where we reveal the psychological extinction that has hopefully occurred.

I think that's it for now. I'll try to get another post up tonight or tomorrow morning to summarize Saturday's work.