Well, it’s been a busy month. That’s putting it somewhat mildly – the last week or so has been possibly the hardest I’ve ever worked on a project, putting in anywhere from 8-12 hours every day and culminating in one last completely brutal 14 hour day on the first of February to wrap the project up. It’s still not perfect, I could definitely find plenty to do if I wanted to spend a week or so on polish and fixes, but for now I really just need to let this one go, because I’m exhausted and I want to move on to something else.
For January, I participated in Wizard Jam, the Idle Thumbs community game jam. The premise of the jam is to create a game based on the title of an Idle Thumbs network podcast, and since many of those titles tend to be weird and imaginative to start with there’s plenty to work with. I picked The Convergence Compulsion, and then later when I found out that someone else was interested in using the same title, appended the subtitle “The Satisfaction of a Job Well Done”, another podcast title. My very early conception of a game to go with this title was a fast-paced 2d puzzle game in the vein of a match-3 or Tetris where you tried to get different laser beams to line up, but the idea that eventually captured my imagination was a game where you build machines out of elements that emit power, manipulate it, and then turn it into some sort of work. Along the way, it shifted away from the idea of building complex machines and towards figuring out a solution to a puzzle made out of a few components and a number of simple humanoids, kind of like the games The Incredible Machine and Lemmings. At the end it came out pretty close to that, except most of the humanoid behavior had to be cut/simplified.
The concept of Convergence Compulsion is that you work for The Convergence Corporation installing hardware in different locations. The hardware usually consists of at least one power orb, which emits power particles, and at least one converger, which attracts them, and then using these and some other devices which focus, reflect, or split these particles you need to power different machinery. This ended up being kind of a finicky concept – Sometimes machinery ends up getting accidentally powered on just due to random chance, sometimes it takes a while to get the equipment specifically where it needs to be to focus particles, sometimes solutions I didn’t anticipate work and sometimes solutions that should work fail to because I didn’t script the levels to account for them. For the most part, though, I think I’ve managed to achieve the game I had in mind.
Here it is:
Convergence Compulsion: The Satisfaction of a Job Well Done
In addition to this, Wizard Jam 8 participants created a number of other great games, many of which I commend to your attention. A few standouts among those I’ve played or seen played thus far:
- Palpable Dreams, a beautiful game about seeing patterns in chaos
- Unmasking The Brain Burglar, a short narrative detective puzzle with great art and humor
- Die Hard: A Christmas Blast, a fast-paced set of mini-games based on Die Hard
I’m exhausted but generally pleased with what I accomplished during January, which brings us to February. Now, I had originally planned on making another game this month, a 2d platformer project so I could better understand the capabilities and methodologies of Unity 2d development, but right now I’m really ready to just not work in Unity for a while. Thus, the 2d platformer project is getting pushed back one month to March, and for February I’m going to be focused on writing music, ideally with the end-goal of making another album. I have a few tracks floating around already, so it will really only take maybe 5 or so more to have enough for an album, but we’ll see where I end up. Even if I don’t end up having enough it’s fine, I just want to spend this month making as much music as I can and definitely not programming.