31/01/2011

Global Games Jam: Planetai

Global Games Jam: Planetai

http://globalgamejam.org/2011/planetai


So this is a game I participated in making over 48 hours in an event called Global Games Jam. The game was made in ‘Game Maker’ as our group lacked the expertise needed to program such a game from scratch.


We started off with a concept of forming planets and keeping them in orbit around a star, this then changed so that these planets gained properties and apperances from coloured meteorites that collided with the planet.


The first thing to be produced was all the combinations of planets that could occur with a maximum of 3 coloured meteorites hitting them. This produced some really nice looking planet rotations, which I hope to compile as a separate video at some point as they were really hypnotic.


Overnight, I started playing with Game Maker in order to prototype the game and create a quick demo, but the scale of it flew out of control as sleep deprivation prevailed and I slowly went mad! By the morning a functioning game was produced with stand-in circles as planets, the sun and meteorites. 


From there it was a matter of getting assets in and tweaking the values and feel of the game until it was fun to play. The game became so hypnotic that we published an infinite version of it to go with it. The game is available at the link above, instructions are simple, the premise is simple but it remains rather difficult to achieve a good score!

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