Computer Chaos
Partnering with Sam again, we tackled a seven day game jam instead of the usual two. The theme for the jam was “let there be chaos.”
Sam quickly came up with an idea for a bunch of pop-ups with little challenges to appear. We didn’t want to start working on the idea immediately to give us time to think of other concepts, but after a little bit, we circled back to it and decided to start working.
Background
I was in charge of most of the art, so I slowly built up the desktop, modeling it after an old windows XP background. A massive problem for us was the resolution. This was the first time that either of us had worked with pixel art. I had used pixel art on OneGeon, but the pixels didn’t have the same size. This meant that enemies would have greater detail than the walls, making it look weird.
Popups
While I was working on the background, Sam was working on the pop-ups. He made some quick art and started coding. We wanted the pop-ups to move around, and two more would spawn when the player hit the ok button. Sam started working on the dragging script, but we later scrapped the idea.
We also wanted small mini-challenges that would make the game more than clicking error windows. The idea was that basic math problems would pop up, and instead of typing in the answer, the player had to use a slider from a range of numbers.
The final pop-up cannot go away. It’s a bar showing how far the virus has gotten. We decided to put a little bit of story by having the player try to beat a virus they accidentally got when clicking a link. The bar goes up and down depending on how well the fight is going.
Finishing Up
Even though this was a seven-day game jam, we still had to pick up the pace at the end. Sam and I had been working on and off for a couple of days. This all culminated in our game not being playable with hours left to go.
I decided to try and fix everything. I kept in most of the discarded scripts and things in case they were instrumental in the game working. I got it to a playable state, but the exporting process was another challenge.
Since we chose a resolution, I tried to export it in that resolution, but it was tiny. After messing around with it, I got it so that it was just the desktop. The sides couldn’t be seen, but that was good enough for me.
The game can be found here on my itch.io page.
After the jam was over, I decided to try and fix some of the problems the game had.
The ok windows only spawned another one.
There was a limited number of math problems, meaning that if the player didn’t stop the virus after the set number of problems they had to sit there and watch as the virus took over.
There was no music.
The ok windows would show up over the math problems and the win screen.
The sizing of the game wasn’t right and so it made the background look weird.
It took another week or so, but in the end the game ended up being pretty polished.