Game Jam: Ski Camp

The theme is: Opposite! You have two days.

Here we go, the company has not been created yet but it will be soon, let’s get started by practicing during a game jam ! Hard to schedule it at first as we don’t even have an office, but we find a week-end, right after a Ludum Dare to have our own game jam. No question on the theme, we just use the same one as the past Ludum Dare: Opposite.

The first project we worked for the company was a Tower Defense in the little red hood universe: what if there were more than one wolf, and if the pack of wolves attacked the grandma house ? Taking a few basics from the Plant vs. Zombies game but where projectiles are launched in the direction drawn by the user finger on his smartphone, this prototype was fun, but very far from the theme. So let’s make the bad guys be the good one and vice versa !

The wolf is the good guy, the player has to help him defeat the little red riding hood

Ok, then, what’s next ? The whole saturday we created prototypes where the wolves were fighting the hoods, but no one was a fun game. So, on saturday night, we pushed the reset button. Let’s start again from scratch! You’ll tell me: that is exactly the WRONG WAY of doing it during a game jam !

It’s winter, could we go skiing ?

Eat a pizza, discuss, throw ideas, throw whatever slips through your mind, here’s the pitch that we keep at the end: the wolves are skiing and the hoods try to make them fall.

We sleep on that idea, and we start fresh on sunday morning to create this new game. On sunday evening, “Ski Camp” was born.

Speed up of slow the wolves to avoid colored hoods and bring back your bags at the cabin.

There are 3 types of wolves and the same applies for the hoods: a fast one, a medium and a slow one. Fast wolves can avoid easily ski lifts and the hoods, so they bring a smaller bag and earn you less points. The slowest wolf will bring the biggest bag and earn the more points. The hoods have each one their own ski lift, and a color for each one of them.

Level editor

I could develop a little level design tool allowing to handle the progression of the game difficulty for each level that the player can climb to. The principle is simple: a little popup is displayed when the script is enabled, and you can restrict the game to the current level to check all parameters:

  • probability for each wolf type per second,
  • probability for each hood type per second,
  • number of points to reach to complete the level,
  • life that are given at the end of the level.

Side by side with those parameters, the popup displays the delta between the current and the previous and the next level, and this feature is the most useful here!

Incoming never

This game lasted a long time, he’s been fun from day one and the concept has been used and used again multiple times as it was simple and yet effective. After the game jam, I took the time to make a more polished version on Kongregate with the online leaderboard (the website will stop its activity soon after writing this, and the ludumdare.com website don’t have my posts of this game anymore, sad time). We tried a visual upgrade but the new one had less style than the original one so it was not published. This game was also included in our white-label catalog so we could reskin it for our customers. Simple and effective, yet difficult to sale that you must not touch the enemy.

Credits

  • Graphisms: Anne-Sophie Girault
  • Musique and sound effects: Le Véhicule (aka Benoit Leteneur)
  • Development: Frédéric Rolland-Porché

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