Here's another (overdue) update of the GGJ event.

You know those movie scenes where a coin spins through the air in slow motion, while the camera quickly cycles through each of the people's faces, hoping the coin drops in their favor? Well, that sort of happened here too.
As much as I hoped for a 'good' outcome, the coin flipped in the other direction and favored the 'weird' concept.

With mixed feelings we went to bed. Content, because we finally had a concept to work with, but at the same time (for me at least) a disappointment because it was not the concept I wanted to work on.

day 2, prototyping
The next day we got up early and separated the team into two. One group started working on a prototype, while the others started working on improving the gameplay.
The premise of the game became the following: Two players each have control over one jellyfish. Both jellyfish are connected to eachother with one of their tentacles. The objective is to reach the surface of the ocean, following a route through a cave system, avoiding hazards like 'evil' coral, and avoiding collision with the cave walls.

Pretty much everyone within our team, except for yours truly had more than basic experience with Flash/Actionscript. So, the logical conclusion was to use Flash as a basis. To keep me occupied as well, we came up with the idea to write a separate level editor in Delphi.
After about half a day we had a workable prototype. Movement of the sprites was not exactly we had in mind, but that was something we could work on. Or so we thought.

Over the course of the day, the list of things we wanted to get in grew and grew: movement of the jellyfish more Asteroids-like, the connection between them more elastic, multiple scrolling backgrounds, several kinds of hazards etc etc.
At the end of the day it became clear that most of them were not possible to get done, in time. My editor, although workable, was put aside. Instead the decision was made to create everything directly within flash. That idea however came with a price as turned out the next day.

day 3, jugdment day
The following day we started early. Completed or not we had to have a working game at 3pm. The required items on the list were again evaluated and only the most relevant kept. At this point any competitive element that should've made the game so special had been removed. In fact, IMO, it had become no more than a boring side scroller. The very thing that was discussed 2 days earlier, but not believed to be true.

As the day progressed, more and more elements were removed. All hazards, although visible would not work. The Asteroids-like motion of the sprites turned out unplayable. Instead we kept the one from the prototype. Collision detection with the walls was working but we only had the temporary map to test. The real map was still a work in progress.

At around 1pm, two hours before the deadline, we had to test the real map in order to make it in time. The original map was designed to move horizontally, but because that option was removed earlier, the entire map had to be reworked to make it easier to navigate through the caves.

Final hour
During the final hour sounds were added, as well as a simple score mechanism and death and win screens. While the main programmer was still working on removing bugs, others spent the remaining 20 minutes playing the game, and creating assets required for uploading the game, such as readme's and screenshots.

3pm. The game was sort of in a playable state, but had a lot of bugs.
3:30pm Presentations, eeek!

Presentations
While I was not exactly looking forward to demonstrating our game, I really wanted to see what others had done. It was a big surprise to see that many of our concepts were, in some form or another, made by different teams into fun looking games. In fact our concept that didn't make it in the end was there, more or less, as well. It even got 2nd place! There really were some great games which showed a lot of potential. In the end our own game performed not exactly great, but neither was it the disaster I expected.

conclusion
In all it was a interesting experience. I'm unsure about participating again though. It was a big disappointment to realize that my Delphi, modeling/3d experience or even game programming experience in general remained largely unused. I was able to share advice on how to do things, and even offer the solution to some collision detection problems, but in terms of programming I remained largely on the sidelines. It was also disappointing to see how the entire process of choosing a concept came about. I did not expect people to be so headstrong about an idea, even when there were some good arguments it, which they waved away with replies like I know thats a problem, but I'm sure we can find a solution while we work on it.
On the other hand, this might not be the case with all teams and next time things might go very different.

Head over to http://globalgamejam.org/Game_browser to see all entries.
Check http://globalgamejam.org/games/brothers-arms to see/play our game.