I will start with a few updates. We did do a Fam Jam in May, but I did not write a blog post about it. #2 Son surprised us by wanting to create a game around mechanisms of practicing arithmetic, and the result is Math Traps. It was a fun jam, but perhaps the most interesting part is how excited #3 Son was to make the soundtrack using LMMS. I also recently put together a public-facing page for the family's github organization. http://the-g-force.github.io/ shows all of our fam jam games.
Now, though, I turn to the main focus of this post: your June Fam Jam.
The Jam was yesterday, and we all worked together to create Get the Food. The game was the second one for which my youngest son (5) served as creative director, his first being Joe Johnson Gets Captured from our first jam. We decided to give him the reins once more rather than moving up in age order, since my oldest son is really already capable of building pretty much anything he can imagine.
It was a kind of difficult to get the youngest to focus in on an idea during our morning meeting in the living room. He started by describing a guy who goes through a magic portal to a campground, and he has to avoid the traps in the tents. Then he gets on a motorcycle and goes somewhere, I cannot remember. Also, he's fighting bad guys, and also he fishes. I'm pretty sure he just unwittingly designed a Zelda game. In any case, we tried to encourage him to rein it in, to focus in on one idea that we could all get behind. The fishing idea seemed to get some traction from the family, and in the course of the discussion, it changed from fishing to being a fish.
#2 Son was excited to apply his recently-developed skills with Piskel to create pixel art. His first fish was created before we settled in on the right screen size, and it was a frustrating conversation to point out that we had our cart before our horse. Once we got the screen size sorted, he made all three animated fish that are in the game.
#3 Son was very happy to work on the soundtrack. His first pass was very busy, with a lot of pasted blocks between tracks. That is, he would lay down something like a bass track and then copy that to the drum track and another bass track, just playing them at different times. It's not all bad, but it's very busy. I worked with him more yesterday than in the past, trying to help him understand a little bit more about composition. In particular, I tried to show him that most instruments just hit one note at a time, especially things like the bass. At one point, I pulled together a simple set of five tracks and challenged him to write something where none of them hit more than one note at a time. Somehow, however, he lost this file or something, since when I came back to where he was working, he was doing something completely different, with some instrument patches I would not have chosen for an underwater game. We worked a bit more, with me trying to encourage him to move notes just to the white notes, in hopes we could at least get something in C Major. It was during this process that I had an epiphany: instead of encouraging him to put everything on the white notes in the piano roll, why not encourage him to use only the black notes? The result would be a pentatonic scale, with significantly less opportunity for dissonance than without this constraint. We were both happy with this result. If you listen to the main theme of the game that plays in the background of gameplay, it is all pentatonics (after I helped him move a few errant tones to the black keys). The theme that plays on the title screen is an excerpt from the first piece he wrote that morning.
#1 Son, as mentioned earlier, has become fairly adept with Godot Engine. The code that he writes is still pretty messy, though, with names that don't always match functionality. He also makes amateur mistakes of perspective. We had an interesting conversation around the relationship between the player-controlled fish and the aquarium scene. I suggested that, instead of having the Aquarium script manually move the player fish around, instead we just have it tell the fish where the player touched. He said, "That sounds complicated." I responded that his perspective was upside-down. Coupling the player-controlled fish to the aquarium was complicated, but putting the fish's behavior into its own script was simpler. There's a sense in which we are both right, and it's just a matter of experience and its concomitant wisdom. Using my approach, though, I explained how we could then reuse this fish behavior in our enemy AI: both the player-controlled and AI-controlled fish had behavior determined by having a destination specified, but it was only a difference of who specified the destination.
We ran into a strange problem late in the game development. #1 Son and I had set up what we thought was a robust approach that would allow for easy adding of different kinds of enemy fish. However, when we got the new art from #2 son for the second enemy fish, it was a different size than the other. This meant that it needed its own collision shape, so we ended up making it a subclass of the original enemy fish. It felt to me at the time like switching to a delegation rather than inheritance approach would be better, but it wasn't clear that we could make this change fast enough for a jam. This approach worked, but we also had trouble that I still don't completely understand. The second fish was not detecting the flakes, but it seemed to have to do with its proximity to the bottom of the tank. We never did figure it out, but #1 Son came up with a workaround that involved using multiple physics layers and masks. Honestly, I struggle to think through the layers and masks system—it is not intuitive to me, so I was grateful that he was able to come up with a workable solution.
I hope you enjoy the game. We went for a nice family walk when we were done. Everyone shared something they learned during the day, and then I also asked each person to share either a question they had or something they wanted to try next. It was a fun, casual reflection session. I also mentioned to them that we could try a different jam format, such as giving everybody the same assets and seeing what they can make with it. #1 Son is adept with Godot Engine, and #2 and #3 can both use Construct. #4 Son and my wife would be left with paper prototyping perhaps. The big idea, anyway, is that I think they're excited to keep making things together, and maybe to try some different modes. Of course, I think #3 is just waiting for his chance to be in charge again so he can draw from his love of rockets and enjoyment of Totally Reliable Delivery Service.
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