Global Game Jam 2019 Day 1

The Beginning

Here I am at another Global Game Jam and the theme this time was "What Does Home Means To You" and wow the amount of potential this theme had. I translated it in many different ways and there like making it a question to the player in terms of how they want to change their base or just a question to all jammers how they perceive home and the game was their answer to it.

The Jam site at KDU as briefing starts

I went to the Game jam site at KDU glenmarie (Event Page) and thought alot about the theme but somehow nothing solid came to my mind that I was satisfied with so I chose to help out in someone else's idea instead. There were really interesting ideas like a monster house chasing the player, a hobo living in a the last badminton park in the world chasing out intruders etc. The game I decided to help was a board game about colonizing new planets and making it their home.

The Idea

The team consists of 6 people with the original creator of the idea Ben, our 3 other designers Sam, Yu Jing and Darshan, and our artist Jan. For the first few hours it was just a constant ping pong of ideas as we try to flesh out our game which we were aiming for different kind of inspirations from Risk to Scythe, from diplomacy to a race of constant battles of armies.

From left to right: Risk , Scythe

After 4 hours of constant discussion we finally decided to just scrap the whole idea as it was too ambitious and it was growing into something that wasn't what we all wanted. We then got a sudden inspiration watching our team leader Ben play with a card like a spaceship and the idea of the game became much simpler which was just a game about players trying to build and land spaceships on a planet and see who scores the most points at the end of it.

Gameplay

The game was inspired by a few games that decided its game play and play style like the board is referenced from Settlers of Catan and the main mechanics do follow Ticket to ride's mechanics. Players start by trying to draw 2 ship part cards from the deck of cards to finish up spaceship blueprints set out on the board. When you finish a spaceship you then choose where to land the spaceships on the board and when the board is filled up the game ends. The spaceships are open to everyone to finish as long they have the required spaceship parts which at the moment are represented by poker card suits, Diamond, Club, Heart and Spade. There are a variety of spaceships which score differently and require different kinds or amount of ship parts to complete. For example the Europa requires 2 ship parts and score 1 point when it lands, Circumference requires 3 different ship parts and scores 1 point for each 2 adjacent ship when it lands and the I-Van requires 5 ship parts and scores 3 points when it lands.

We tested the game with our placeholder poker cards and a board drawn on mahjong paper to quickly check how fun the game is. After a few rounds we balanced out a few values we then decided to call it a day and rest.