One of the greatest things to come out of GameCity 5 is a collaboration between Adam ‘Atomic’ Saltsman and Rebecca Mayes.
During the festival, a myriad of designs and doodles were jammed into an ideas bucket (cleverly turned into Pac-Man by some of NTU’s talented Theatre Design students) for Adam to turn into a working game LIVE in the GameCity Lounge. Rebecca was tasked with creating an original soundtrack to the finished game. Also LIVE.
To catch up on the lengthy back story read the previous blog post which details the plan. Let us now detail the results.
Adam has written about the process better than we ever could and we’re going to paraphrase his blogposts from Semi Secret. So, from the mind and keyboard of Mr Atomic himself: How ‘A Lost Thought trying To Find It’s Way Back’ came to exist.
Adam's Ideas Bucket
GameCity Part 1: Ready For Liftoff!
Well, it’s 4am UK time, but I’m finally uploading all 223 pieces of art (30MB of PNG files!) that were put into the Idea Bucket this week. I’m gonna get a bit of sleep now, but by morning (go go hotel internet!!1) you should be able to access all the files, including the flixel skeleton, from this URL:
http://github.com/AdamAtomic/GameCity5
It went way better than I expected – there are a bunch of amazing ideas in there (look in designs.txt to get started), and tons of absolutely adorable artwork to use. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to build tomorrow, but I think dreams might be a good place to start?
GameCity Part 2: Idea Game
Well I’m back in the States again after another fantastic week at GameCity! We have some big announcements about our new game and collaboration coming very soon, but I wanted to wrap up the Idea Bucket before I got back to bizniz.
If you were following along last week, you’ll remember that I was in Nottingham, getting ready to make a game in 8 hours with my friend Rebecca Mayes, based on ideas and drawings made by the kids that attended the GameCity5 festival in the town square. Well, we did it! And it turned out pretty cool I think. There are two versions of the game online:
Click here to play the Jam Version
Click here to play the Updated Version
The first hour or so was mainly spent setting up a title screen and a kind of jiggle-animation system for the cut-out pictures. I started to get worried after that first hour, because it was time to make a call about what the game would actually be. I opted for one of the submitted ideas:
Make a game about a lost thought trying to find its way back.
This was accompanied by an adorable crayon drawing of a crying thought bubble, of course!
…So we built it! Rebecca wrote not one song but TWO, which we could cross-fade and pan dynamically as the player explored the dreamspace. Unfortunately, we ran out of time before I could include all 110 monsters, so we only had 55 in the “official” version. The updated build has 34 different “player” thoughts, and 110 monster thoughts, all drawn and submitted by the kids that attended the festival.
…Only thing I will add is that if you’re planning on incorporating a lot of kids art in a project, letting them work with traditional materials is great – just don’t give them glitter.
"Why did I agree to this?"
Please go and read Adam’s full account over at the Semi Secret blog. Play the game! Hopefully your amazement at the talent and dedication shown by Adam and Rebecca equals ours.
P.S.
Adam is still finding glitter everywhere he goes.
Rebecca continues to write brilliant songs about games and life.
