About a week ago, a few of us decided to get together at a local hangout spot to have a mini game jam.  This is where you spend a short time brainstorming a concept, and then you make a game out of it.  You never expect it to be a deep or engaging game, not to mention fully working and pretty one, but hopefully it will something entertaining, and something that may be worked into a much better game later.  Unless it already is a really good one.

So we came up with the constraint that the game must contain coconuts in one way or another. So we came up with a list of about 8 coconutty  ideas that we could potentially make. A few were really good which we may make into a game later at some point. But for the sake of time, we choose the simplest idea-

Dodge falling coconuts.

Okay, not the most profound idea, but it’s an idea nonetheless, and seeing that we didn’t have much time, it was worth a shot.  The point was that we make something, rather than just sit around and talk about making things.  This one thing that I feel was our real problem as a group.

So it was done, we started, and had a rough prototype up relatively quickly. What happened next was the interesting part. I’ll let Chris Algoo explain it, as I don’t think I can do much better…

To test the coconut functionality (two words that, perhaps, have never been in such proximity), Arthur set it up so that clicking the mouse anywhere in the level would drop a coconut. I picked up the controller and started to move the character around. Immediately something happened – I was running this way and that, jumping and avoiding coconuts, and Arthur was clicking madly, dropping the virtual fruits on my poor avatar. None of us had planned for this, but here it was. It was magic. It was creativity. Our game was multiplayer the whole time, and we didn’t even know it. This is why we came – to work until something amazing appears. We played, and tweaked, and imported David’s amazing art, the pace ever increasing until our workshop had to close for the night at 1 AM.

-Chris Algoo

Ugly as hell, but it's a rapid prototype and kinda fun to play

Overall, we were rather surprised that it came out more interesting and entertaining than we first thought it would be. We’ll share what we’ve done once we add a bit of polish to it and let you play it with a friend…

I will be planning another one of these for the week after this year’s  this year’s MAGFest, just in time to practice for the Global Game Jam at the end of the month.  I will be a bit picky with invites for now, but that’s only until we get a good idea of what we’d need to do to have this open to everyone who wants to attend to join these rapid creativity sessions, and hopefully also start something that would be great for creatives in NYC.