Concept:
You are the blacksmith of a new town and must create or repair weapons and tools for the villagers as they work through a particularly harsh winter.
Progress:
My regular business got in the way of starting when I should have - today is my first day. I may have shot myself in the foot. I'll need to keep this in mind when figuring out scope and trim as much of the fat as possible. Hopefully, I can finish in time.
Today's brainstorming session went well. Initially, I was hit with blank page syndrome for the first few hours and found myself procrastinating. I managed to convince myself to read a bit of The Game Production Handbook, and that got the gears spinning. I'm excited about creating a paper prototype tomorrow. I've even already set out the game pieces I'm going to use. I'm hoping that spending time doing paper prototyping will help 'find the fun' quicker than prototyping in-engine since I have minimal experience with coding.
My Background:
I'm currently developing a small game with a very experienced dev, but I'm brand-spanking new to the process, which isn't making our development move any faster.
It seems weird, I'm sure, that a guy who has no experience in game dev has somehow wedged himself onto a team with a seasoned game dev veteran. That's mostly a matter of being lucky and just knowing the right people.
My full-time business is creating game trailers and game-related videos. Sometimes, clients have me capture the footage directly within Unity, which made me -just- comfortable enough with it that I want to try to create something from scratch. A lifelong friend who was my college roommate saw my video and graphic work and thought maybe I could adapt those skills to game dev. Well, here I am, trying just that, which leads to...
Why I entered:
This is not only my first game jam, but it will be my first finished game. To help bridge the gap between our experience levels at a faster rate than just learning on our current project, I thought doing a series of game jams would help. I could very well fall flat on my face. Even if that's the case, at least I'll have learned enough to know what -not- to do next time. I'll 'Edge of Tomorrow' my way through an entire game dev career if I have to.
-Don