The setup

Bringing a team of 20+ people to a game jam was a crazy idea. Especially considering most of us didn't know each other, or at least hadn't worked together before. And yet that is exactly what our small community of developers did. With all sorts of specialists and experience ranging from complete newbies to veterans with 10+ years of game jams, the thing was in the bag before we started! (no it wasn't)

With such a large team, we had to start preparing for the jam well ahead of time; in the two preceding weeks, we tried to get to know each other, decide what role everyone is going to play in the project, and get a general estimate of what we could do together.

As it turned out, we had enough people to handle not only the programming, art and sound design, but also people dedicated to game design and narrative design! Me? I was to move between each department's Discord channel and stream the whole thing as it developed.

That was when we decided to use Unity as our engine of choice, and got the general gist of the kind of game we'd like to make: something first-person built around combining cards, maybe some form of deckbuilder or collectible card game. We also threw a bunch of other ideas on the whiteboard in the hopes that they would find a use in the jam.

We also made a quick Unity arena prototype to make sure we can build a scene with some assets from our artists, and get a player character in there, who can move around and shoot things. So, although most of our teammates hadn't worked with one another before, we made sure we understood the basic process.

It begins

By the 15th, everything was set with a dedicated Discord server, a Miro digital whiteboard to organise our ideas, and a GitHub project so everyone could work together. All eyes were on the Youtube waiting for the year's theme to be announced. Then, there it was: Roll of the Dice!

Cards are like dice, right? Will their inherent randomness suffice to fit the theme? Will the game designers go crazy from overwork trying to create an entire dice game (yes they will)? We stuck with the card concept for the initial ideation and brainstorm session, which lasted a good couple of hours.

Maybe we could have one die in each hand and rolled them together to cast spells? What if you could put cards on each of the faces and keep the deck-building idea this way? Too slow for a jam game. How about just colours to represent elements and spell shapes, and finding whole (randomly-generated) dice instead of customising them? That's faster-paced, but still too complex.

Within two hours we've more or less settled on a keep it simple, stupid, idea, that would see very little change during development: you have a revolver with a die for a cylinder, your enemies are dice, and you have to shoot out their individual faces by rolling higher. Stick it in a simple arena setup and we're good. Awesome!

Some honourable mentions:

• A game where surfaces are made of dice and you have to shoot them to make combinations that create enemies, powerups, and obstacles.
• A turn-based tactics game where dice rolls affect a lot of your possible actions.
• Something tetris- (or Catherine?)-like where you have to escape a maze of falling dice.
• Building a path out of randomised tetromino-style elements.
• A turn-based shooter.

From that point, we needed a theme. How about a Western-themed cyberpunk-- no, the artists don't want to draw cyberanything. Come on, we have a revolver, it has to be a Western! Nah, let's try something else, instead.

Well, if we're dealing with dice, so how about putting the player inside a boardgame? Okay, why? Game store owner shrunk him! Why? That gave our narrative designers some serious pause. You see, there has to be a reason that will make the protagonist likeable and the antagonist, well... antagonistic.

The first and obvious idea having the player character steal a pack of dice. That would have made the store owner's retribution understandable, but unjustly harsh — but at the same time, it would paint the protagonist as an arse. If he broke something by accident, instead, it would make him clumsy, and while we wanted a comedic tone, we didn't really want to create it at the player character's expense.

So what horrible misdeed would 1: cause a disproportionately harsh and unjust response from the store owner, 2: be understandable of the protagonist, and 3: not be so niche that players outside of the boardgaming community won't get the joke? Of course, asking the owner of a high-end games shop for something so pedestrian and near-universally hated as Monopoly!

With that decision, everyone went to their department to begin working on their first contributions to the project as the night wound down. Only the bravest stayed up, but I wasn't among them. So I left, hopeful after seeing Daniil's initial sketch of what would become the magician enemy and really looking forward to the final result when I came back...