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Post date: Feb 01, 2016 1:10:37 PM
Our Android game in development now, Hoard Lord, started as a game jam entry, back in 2012. The initial conception of this game was, of course, quite far from what we ended up creating.
We participated in the 2012 Chicago Game Jam, run by the Chicago chapter of the IGDA and hosted at The Nerdery in Chicago. This was the first game jam my partner and I, Brandon, had participated in. We decided to go with the moniker "Team HDCheese," for some reason. The theme of this game jam was "The goal is to lose." With this in mind, our initial concept was for sort of a "runner" style game, where a hoarder was trying to outrun his junk that was chasing him. The junk would try to attach to the hoarder to try to slow them down and get in their way - you tried to "lose" the junk to win.
With our concept cemented (haha, or so I thought), I went to work creating a simple physics system where rectangular objects could collide and move properly and Brandon started creating our sprites. I had practiced for this - leading up to the game jam, I tried coding a simple physics system from scratch 3 or 4 times, arriving at a system that seemed to work quite well for basic platformer mechanics. So, at the game jam site, I built one of these systems again. I somehow deviated from my planning, because I ended up having to basically scrap and rewrite it... and now we found ourselves about 18 hours in to our 24 hour game jam! We regrouped and reviewed - we still had about a million mechanics to cement, code, and test - like everything related to the levels, the junk that chases you, and how that junk could attach to you and slow you down...
This is when we decided to scrap most of the functionality of our initial concept in the interest of actually finishing the thing. So, we reduced the concept to this: You are a hoarder in a vertical "endless jumper" where junk constantly falls from above and you have to ascend. You lose when you are "trapped" and can't proceed upwards for a specified amount of time. The problem with this concept is that it did not jive at all with the theme... So we created some weird mechanics to try to make it work: You gain score when you stay still surrounded by objects, and lose score slowly at all other times. The hoarder "likes it" when you stay still, but that will basically make you lose. It was odd and thrown together, but we went with it.
At this point we discovered that my simple, perfectly-serviceable-for-normal-platformers physics engine started behaving badly when you had tons of objects piled on top of each other and constantly colliding... There were lots of cases where you could shimmy around just right and manage to move through an object you were touching. Oh well - we had finish and it still worked well enough to get by! We fixed and hid all the bugs we could, Brandon recorded a bunch of sounds, found some free music to use, and created title screen and Game Over screen art, and we powered through getting this unholy thing working in time to be judged! We literally came up with the name "Hoard Lord" in the final seconds before officially submitting the game to the judges!
We were blown away to discover that people actually liked the game! We saw it as a terribly weird, buggy mess, but people seemed charmed by the odd concept, Brandon's great art, and I think the simplicity actually worked for it. We were awarded 2nd place! That's actually where our company name came from - at our next game jam we also placed second (which I'll probably post about at a later date), and it became a running joke that this was our destiny to always place second.
It was a great experience, and I would encourage anyone who's dabbled with game development to participate - the lessons you learn about scope management and what it takes to really finish a game are extremely valuable, as well as the connections you make with other developers!
Here are a few images from the game jam version of the game:
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