Marathon Heart Day 1

Roughly 1pm to 10pm with an hour break for dinner and a walk.

Brainstormed 3 ideas. Chose the one that I liked the best. It also seemed like it wouldn’t be too hard for a 60 hour contest.

The game would be a running game where, instead of controlling the runner, you control the runner's internal organs. This acknowledges the theme (inside/outside) and the limitation (no direct control of player). One could argue that controlling the organs is still direct control of the player, but at least it’s different than the usual wasd.

I opened Unity and placed a few square sprites, then opened Inkscape and made a bunch of images. A running surface, a rock, a plant, a couple houses, a runner which I hope to animate later. Also made a cloud and a peace sign, with the intent to fit them in somewhere to satisfy the other two themes of the jam.

I plopped down the runner and the running surface. Then I set up a game controller to spawn the moving objects off screen to the right, and a simple script to move them through the view left and destroy them when they get out of sight.

Now on to the hard part. User input. I wasn’t really sure how a user would control organs, so I stopped to think about it for a while. Hearts beat, the user has to match the beat. Lungs breath, the user has to match the breathing. Legs knot and cramp, the user has to massage the legs. The last one was going to be about sweat, but I couldn’t figure out what to do so I talked it over with my girlfriend. In the course of talking it over, we realized that it could simply be drinking water based on whether or not it was going to rain. And the rain would be determined by the number of clouds. Thus the user has another thing to pay attention to while running – and it fits the theme!

I made the icons and got the heart and drink portions working before going to bed. TODO: get the lungs and muscle mini-games working, add the scoring system, add feedback to the mini-games, animations, sounds, music, polish.