Game about brave captain of a kyykkä team trying to sober up and make it to the tournament quarters.
The theme for the year 2020 was repair. In finnish this is “korjaus”, and “korjaussarja” literally translates to “repair kit” but also means a drink to help you get past the hangover state. We agreed instantly that this will be the theme for our game. Now it was just left for us to figure out how will this translate into a game. Our initial idea was to make a 2.5d single room game in which the player awakens from his house and has to gather multiple ingredients to the blender to make the ultimate hangover cure and each time he hits something he shouldn't it would mess up with the controls of the game. However, we figured out that this might prove to be too difficult as we would need to draw too many assets and we weren't entirely prepared for that. Another idea was to simply make a game where the player has to travel to somewhere while talking to npc's and gathering drinks along the way to feel better and move faster. We also remembered one incident of similar kind from a past kyykkä tournament where the team captain was having a bad hangover and alledgedly had hard time walking to the game site from a nearby student housing, and after having a small laughter with the team we decided that this would be the story and gameplay of our game.
So, the game resolves around few factors:
We had previously decided that we'll use 2.5d graphics, and to do that we ended up in using the Phaser html5 framework: https://phaser.io/ In addition to the actual game engine, we would need some audio, which we would create using the FL Studio software. https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/ Lastly, we needed the graphics for the game and decided to create the sprites of the npc's and the player by using piskel https://www.piskelapp.com/ and lastly, as we had to recreate the university surroundings in the game, we ended up on using tiled https://www.mapeditor.org/ to create a level with some tileset art which we found from https://opengameart.org/
So, now that we had found the tools, it was time to do the initial setup. This took a lot more time than we had expected, since one of our developers used a Mac environment, and not all of the tools were compatible. We also had lots of trouble with our git repository (again), and struggled to get the phaser base file running on every machine. We hosted our project in GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/ and after the initial hassle with the setup, everything was ready to race and we started the development process.
We (of course) encountered some problems with the development process, and here are just some of them that we can remember:
Unfortunately, in 2020 we only had 24 hours of time instead of 48 to actually make the game. As a result, the final result contains only the very core features, such as animated and controllable player sprite and the tiled map based on the university premesis which the player can explore. There are npc assets and audio assets in the source code, but they are not yet implemented. It was our initial idea to make the game as simple as possible in order to finish it in the 24 hours time period, but this proved to be near impossible due to all of the hassle with the initial setup.
Some things that we didn't have time to make:
This year sadly we only had 24 hours of time to make the game. This is why we tried to make it as simple as possible, and still were quite surprised about how much time simple things can take (such as getting the initial phaser5 running on every machine and setting up the git for everyone). Even though this was a mini-edition of the jam for us, it was still a quite good learning experience as this forced us to go from where the fence was the lowest, and if we should have had time for another day, the game would surely have been finished as we had tackled all of the main obstacles by the end of saturday.
Best regards, Munkkiliiga.