Tuesday, November 15, 2016

#asylumjam2016 So can we go on the bus now?

So I tried my hand at the #asylumjam2016 game jam over the weekend, I say tried because I didn’t finish with a playable game.

The theme was escape the room, which made me think of a short story my wife publish a couple of years ago. It tells the story of Gary, stuck in his primary class room with people from the class that have died.  It becomes evident that he too has died. The idea is that the Non playing characters (NPC) help Gary understand the truth of why he is there.
The game “So Can We Go On The Bus Now?” is a point and click Adventure game, doing all the Graphics, music and coding in a weekend proved too much though. I did go to the Pub Saturday night and also slept 8 hours per night, so about 20hours lost there, so if the challenge was to create a game using 48hour, I maybe could of finished. 

Anyway now for the blah blah on why it failed and what I should have done differently.

To create the game I created two scenes, one is the car crash that kills Gary and the other is the Classroom. The crash scene is non intractable and used as a flashback. It is also an unreliable narrator scene, not what actually happened.
In Inkscape I quickly knocked up the layout of the classroom, I decided on a 2.5d approach, this made creating the graphics that bit trickier.



I created an ItemBase class as a ScriptableObject.

public abstract class ItemBase : ScriptableObject
{
    public Sprite[] sprites;
    public AudioClip click;
    public AudioClip music;

    public string Title;
    public string Description;
    public float ZoomSize = 0f;
    public float ZoomY = 0f;
    public SpriteRenderer spriteRender;
    public GameObject go;

    public abstract void Examine();
}

Then inherited it for Inventory item, NPC or non-moveable that way coding will be easier by avoiding nested if statements. 
Each class has code that it only needs to know about.
Then I created .asset files for each of the objects so I could edit them easily in the IDE.

Still to do:
Conversation system
Inventory
Giving items to NPC


I am going to continue this and get it finished. Making it my 6th game but totally different from previous games, I probably wouldn’t have chosen this type of game but the game jam makes you work outside your comfort zone.

I put it up on the GameJolt site anyway,  but I don't expect any votes as it isn't playable.
It was really good fun creating it though :)


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