Ideation for the game jam

It all started with the theme announcement. The theme was 'Only One' for the GMTK game jam 2019. The focus of the jam was game design. So we took good 2 hours to write down broader keywords in games which can be only one (eg. Enemy, Platform, Resource, Inventory Slot, Sprite,etc. ). We had a good list of 30 such keywords. 

After this, we took the ones we liked or found interesting. After doing this, we came down to a list of 10. This resulted in everyone being on same page with the kind of idea we were going for.

The major catch of the theme was that, the theme could be used to cut down on something which wasn't good for the design but it fit the theme. Eg. Making a platformer with just one life. So we had to stay away from ideas which were lazy design.

After the list of 10 was made, each team member took up 3 words they liked and tried to come up with game ideas with any combination of those 3 keywords.

Few of the keywords from our list of 10 : Sprite, Resource, Light, Tower, Level, etc.

So after this exercise we went and discussed the ideas we had, and one of the teammates took the keywords 'Sprite' and 'Resource' and came up with the idea of UnBlend where the whole game is made using just one sprite and since the world elements are the same sprite, it can be a part of the player which also sold the theme of being one with the world. So initially, the only idea was a puzzle platformer where you can attach or detach with the world elements to solve puzzles.

After doing this, the programmers started prototyping the idea and the designers started designing elements and levels. We had a lot more ideas about the elements that could have been included but decided to cut down on it due to the time constraint.

Few learnings :

•  Version control is good for game jams if done right
•  Consider sfx, music and tutorial way before than the submission
• A good sleep is important during game jams to stay fresh
• For programmers, do not try to make the most modular code during the game jam, regardless of how good of a programmer you are, write quick and dirty code for the jam. Because most of the times, there is a mind block when thinking about the most optimised code.