Game in a Day - Done!

OK, we're a couple of hours late, but we're done! Total production time, approximately 12 hours.

Click here to download the game. It's called "corn.zip" and the executable is called "corn.exe". This is because the codename for the project was "corn".

Monday I'll try to post more detail about the project, but for now, boy, I'm tired of being here!

How to play
Use the mouse to navigate the garden and interact with the plants.
* Click on a flower to pick up a copy
* Click on a bare patch of ground to plant a held flower
* Right-click on a flower to kill it

The four "stock" flowers present at the beginning of the game cannot be killed.

Flowers placed near enough one another may breed, producing genetically based offspring. Each flower has a number of traits determining how it will breed. Individual flowers have preferred soil types and will reproduce more readily if planted in their preference.

Screenshots

Game in a Day - Introduction

Hi there! This is Steve helping Valerie out with coverage for the Game in a Day event.

I thought I'd introduce the concept a bit, for those who don't already know what's going on. I'll post more later, but for now...

What is Game in a Day?

The Game in a Day event is an attempt to put together a playable game prototype in less than a day. Our whole company put aside everything else they were working on in order to help out with the project. One downside about doing this as a work project is we really only have about 8 hours of production time (though we started with planning and discussion yesterday). The upside is that we've got a bunch of people all working together on it. (Or is that another downside, too...?)

What are the Rules?

We get today only to make the game. Nobody was allowed to write code (besides setting up a blank template project linking to our Wraith engine) or create music or work on scripts or create art assets until this morning, and we have to stop at 6pm. (OK, we might go a little past that, but we'll see how it goes).

In fact, nobody but the four leads (and management) knew what the game was going to be before yesterday afternoon. We had a big meeting to talk about the design and brainstorm a plan for producing it.

We have to start with a clean project, but we're allowed to aggressively borrow useful code from previous games that we own, just like we would for any full project.

Almost all of the art and music is expected to be completely new.

At the end of the day today, we'll post a playable version of the game. Or heads will roll.

What's the Point?

Here are the objectives of the project, in approximately their order of significance:

1. Have some fun, shake things up a bit.
   
2. Stretch our abilities and get better at our jobs. This includes some people trying out new art styles, new programming techniques, and taking on new roles outside what they're used to.
3. Try out a specific game idea we think might be fun.
   

Where did this come from?

A bunch of other people around the world have done game-in-a-day events for years, sometimes in big teams and sometimes in teams of just 1 or 2 people. There are similar "Game Jam" events as well, sometimes lasting more than a day.

We've done this a few times before as a company, and some of us have done it before as individuals. Even A Kingdom for Keflings was loosely based on some ideas from a Game in a Day prototype!

See http://www.indiegamejam.com/ or search garagegames for GID-related posts. I wish I could post URLs for some other sites that used to be all about game-in-a-day contests, but they seem to have died and grown ad weeds.

Can You Spot the Differences?

About a year and a half ago we did a Game in a Day, and from it the idea for A Kingdom for Keflings was born. NinjaBee will be doing another Game in a Day starting Thursday evening and all day Friday (okay, so it'll be a Game in a Day and a Few Hours) and I'll be blogging and twittering all about it. So in light of that, I thought I'd show off the initial pitch trailer and concept document for A Kingdom for Keflings. In order to keep this post shorter than 1 million words, I'll show you the trailer today and the pitch doc tomorrow. This part below was written by The Fox (Our art director Brent).

Part 1:

The first stage in game development is forming a rough concept. Before getting into all of the details everyone involved needs to understand the basic premise of the game. There are many methods of formulating and presenting a game idea. NinjaBee’s approach has been to create a “pitch document”. This document can be used to pitch the game internally or even used to evaluate the interest of a potential publisher.

We have two simple guidelines that we follow when we are creating these pitch documents:

• Keep it short. (Usually just a couple of pages).
If you can’t explain your game in a couple of pages it may be a bad design or it may need some more time in the oven. Also, executives won’t bother to read a lengthy design document unless you first catch their attention with a short pitch.

• Define the look and feel of the game
It is surprising how important art can be to illustrate an idea. No matter how much anyone says they can look past place holder art, they can’t. The best thing to include is a mock-up of what a screen shot may look like.

In addition to a good pitch document (which you will see in tomorrow's post), we like to create a trailer. When pitching a game, most publishers will ask for a working demo. However, we have found that a trailer is actually better than a demo of the game. For one thing, it would take months to create the effects/features in a demo that we can fake in a week in a trailer. Also, people are more easily convinced after seeing a good movie that shows what the game can do than a demo that crashes every two minutes or a boring bullet list of features.

And with that, here's the trailer that we pitched to Microsoft. As you can see, a LOT has changed...(for example, the working title was My Kingdom)