52 Girls and more

Another Flowjam in the books. The theme this time was Unintended Consequences - a tough one to be sure. I've been sitting on this idea for a game based on the song 52 Girls for a while and this seemed like a good opportunity to UNDERSCOPE and do something simple for once. But that's not how things happened. 

The jam started on a Thursday while I was out of town for the holidays. I had no access to a computer, but I did have my sketchbook. I've always dome a lot of concepting in my sketchbook and this time was no different, except that I was travelling in a bumpy van across Michigan highways. 

I laid out an entire chart of face shapes, hair styles, eyes, clothes, expressions and accessories and did my best to make each look different - with a few trickier ones mixed in. The original B-52s sone only names 26 girls, but luckily The Offspring did a cover of the song and added another 26 girls to complete the set. There were some names that were very similar -- Cindy/Cyndee/Cynthia or Jane/Joan/Jen or Rose/Rosa/Roma -- but I figured that would be part of the challenge.

Once back home and ready to work, I still had trouble finding time to actually sit down at my computer to make any progress. I started doing my pixel art on my phone with an app called Pixel Studio. It took a second to get used to it, but I was able to draw all my characters and do a lot of the text in the app and transfer it to Flowlab. I didn't have to do much art in the actual engine which was a time saver. BUT, I was trying out a mechanic that I'm not familiar with. Other users offered me some tips and tutorials, but after a couple failed attempts to understand how the example blocks would be apply to my game, I fell back on my typical jam strategy - brute force it. 

Instead of having all 52 girls in each card position (and risk duplicates) I divided the deck into 3 piles so that the same card could not appear in two spaces at once. This caused a lot of repetition, but no duplicates. The repetition actually helped to reenforce the names, so that was a happy accident. I got the game loop set up and then concentrated on adding in the other pages -- tutorial, credits, yearbook. 

The yearbook list was one of the last pages I built. I needed to figure out how to have the yearbook pictures revealed if you had seen the girl in the round prior. It wasn't as complicated as I thought, but I still felt rushed as I got closer to the 2-week cut off. Still, it was a complete and beatable game, which is more than I can say for a majority of my jam games. I succeeded in keeping my scope down, but still ran right up to the deadline fixing little inconsistencies and praying that I wouldn't break anything in the code. 

The rendition of 52 Girls by baconcat008 (and a little mini jingle of Rock Lobster in the credits) really made me happy and made the game feel real fun. It was an essential part of the game for setting the chunky pixel, retro sound. 

The jam rating are out soon. I'll post an update when the scores are released. I hope you enjoy the game, leave me a comment and if you know anyone in the B-52s or The Offspring tell them I said Hi!  

Thanks for playing! 
todorrobot :)