CIGA GAME JAM PROJECT
In August, 2020, I participate in the Game Jam held by China Indie Game Alliance(CIGA). The jam require all participants to complete a game project within 48 hours as a team. Due to the effects of COVID, all developing process have to be complete online this year.
In this game jam, I team up with other high school students live in a wide range of country including China, Canada, and Australia. Although we have different culture background, we share same faith towards game production. Together, we formed the Little White Boat team and came up with the game project: Shattering.
TEAM MEMBERS AND ROLES
The composition of our team is really ideal: we got two level designer, two digital artists, two programmers, and a sound designer. I work as one of the programmer, and have the responsibility of UI building and inputing resources to the program. Because of this job, I have to constantly contact with other team members to confirm about the progress and discuss works to adjust timely.
THEME OF 2020
The theme this year is a painting from Chinese artist Qiu Dandan. When we first recieve this theme, almost everyone in the team are shock and confuse since the picture is extremely abstract. Then, we researched through the background information of the picture, and brainstormed ideas based on the emotion it conveys.
FINAL PLAN
After brainstorming ideas, we come up eventually with the final plan: Design a 2D exploring and puzzle solving game about a girl who has been ignored by her family and suffered of school bullying. We believe the story fit into the emotion reveals by the theme: dissiciation and loneliness.
UI BUILDING
Some interesting works that I want to discuss about
Design of double world
While we are discussing the plot of the game, we came up with the idea of building two reversing world to symbolize main character has been dessociate with the world and let players to collect letters from two world to finally deduce out the truth.
The text bar and reversed text bar
While I'm building the text bar of the game, I formed the thought of making a broken text bar that replace the original one while player find letters in the reversed world(symbolizing the desperate mental world). I discussed it with the digital Artist Neveah and successfully realized this idea.
Ant Progress bar
We have oberved from the theme picture that there are lots of ants crossing outside the window. We consider ants in this situation as negative emotion of the girl and want to incorporate this element into the game. Beside, we are considering using a progress bar in the user interface for players to check their letter collecting progress. Therefore, the final outcome become an ant progress bar that will gradually be fill up by ants as player kept collect up letters.