Llamas to Space: GGJ Game

I’m taking on a side-project from my side-project this weekend in celebration of the Global Game Jam.  They’re a bit related, though!

The Diversifiers of Inspiration

GGJ does its best to help spice things up a bit by posting not only a theme, but also “diversifiers.” Diversifiers can be thought of as challenges or achievements to strive for you in your game development, and are usually a diversion from “standard” gameplay mechanics.  I particularly like them as they spark my imagination.

The list of diversifiers this year was full of inspiring angles on gameplay (even if they are a bit technically heavy this time around). The ones that jumped out at me were numbers 3 and 4:

3. Asymmetry
(Every player is different)
The game requires more than one player, but each player has entirely different goals and rules.

4. Collaborative Casual/Hardcore
(Two players: one casual, one hardcore)
Collaborative play for two, but one player has more to do than the other (or the difficulty level is different between them).

I’ve been on a recent co-op kick;  the barren wasteland of co-operative video games drove me to board gaming, where I’ve been having a lot of fun. I’m often pining for titles I can play at my computer – and with my girlfriend, who has significantly different tastes in games.

This particular mixture of asymmetry, differing skill levels, and my own personal desire for co-op play, seemed to open up several doors in my imagination. Maybe I could fill this void! Llamas to Space was born!

Setting Up

I’ve been developing for mobile devices for the last week, but a lot of my time spent has been learning the ropes. I feel like I know enough now to make something much faster than before, if I build on what I learned. I decided right from the start that Llamas to Space would be:

• iPad only
• Co-operative, 2 player
• Simultaneous gameplay
• With two very different games for each player
• … but the two games have intermixed mechanics; one players performance can effect the other player.

I hope that mix will make engaging gameplay, encourage discussion between players, and be a fun game that can be shared across diverse gameplay preferences.

I also settled on a bit of a backstory and plot to help guide the style and development. I’ll save that for later. :)

I slapped together a few placeholder pieces of art, and set out to do what I do with all my jam games: learn something new.

Work so far

The first thing I needed to tackle was handling simultaneous touch inputs for two different players. This is something I’ve never done before, wasn’t sure was possible using AS3/AIR, and I definitely had no way of emulating it on my PC dev environment.

After some scouring of the internet I figured out how the touch event listeners worked, I got my first tech-test app built surprisingly fast!  Took me about 30 minutes to have the basic arena setup with two player inputs being tracked seperately.

I actually spent much more time figuring out how to work around the PC emulation problem. I can’t develop very quickly if I have to push a build to my iPad every time I compile. I didn’t find a good solution so I just hacked another layer of mouse event listeners on top of everything else. It’s messy, but that’s what gamejams are for: messy code!

All in all, I only put in 3 hours of work today (we had a late start and some technical issues at the GGJ venue). But I manged to pull off this:

Glorious programmer-art! The brown line is the divider that cuts through the middle of the iPad screen; one player plays on the bottom (cropped in this photo), the other player plays on the top.

What I’m demonstrating here is a basic “castle defence” style of gameplay; badguys stream in, and you have to repel them by hitting them with lobbed mortars (missle-command style, I suppose). I’ve got a lot of ideas for making this a difficult, unique action-gameplay experience. For now, I’m happy to say that player 1 actually has something to do, with actual win/lose conditions!

I’m also excited to have implemented what is, essentially, mini-blitting for the first time. The backdrop gets “stamped” with death and crater images; they aren’t unique gameplay objects, and they don’t fade with time. I’m guessing the battlefield will be pretty piled up at the end!

I haven’t worked on player 2′s game yet so I’ll save that for another post. :)

Hope everyone else is having fun at GGJ this weekend!