#ggj2013

                                    (From left to right: Silva, Midio, Noia, Camis and Trevis)

What? You don't know what the GGJ is? The Global Game Jam is a worldwide marathon in which groups and individuals from all around the world gather together on registered places to develop games for 48 hours. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say that this might be the biggest and best game event of the whole world, and while it happens only once a year, it's very fun and rewarding! It's a non-competitive marathon, so you can take a sneak peek at the neighbor's desks and discuss some game ideas with your other friends and groups. It's a huge sandbox for experimenting on game design. The GGJ organization gives every year a different theme to help the teams develop something nice. While last year's theme seemed very, very unique by using a single image (the ouroboros), we were quite surprise to hear about this year's theme.

Yes, that's right, hear. This year's theme was the sound of a pumping/beating heart. While the theme seemed easy at first, as love is everywhere and probably is the most widespread and discussed matter in games, music, art and general media, it's really hard to escape from the most direct and superficial representation of hearts, blood, or love-related stuff. Well, here's a tiny overview of how we worked this jam and the game we made! Let's get started!

1) Defining the Idea 

Once we were all set in the place and had our computers connected and stuff like that, we decided to think a bit about the idea at a farther place, such as a small piece of grass outside our host building. You know, people discussing lots of ideas make lots of noise! We came up with the question: what makes your heart races? Such a hard question to answer, right? Well, we decided to stick with the binary: FEAR vs. LOVE. These are two survival responses of alive things: one must fear to be alive,  and must love to feel protected  and safe.

                                                (Just some notes from our sketchbooks)

But, what makes your heart races in games? 

Usually a big boss fight, or being chased by an enemy, or even speed or risky situations. Well, we though a bit more and decided to unite the "chase" concept with the "love-fear" concept, and came up with this rhythm like game we wanted to make, suited for two players (as love usually envolves more than just one person).

This stage took us about 1 hour and a half/2 hours.

2) Prototyping/ Concept art

While Midio was drawing the first concept art and trying to find a suitable art style for the game, Trevis and Camis were prototyping the idea to see if it seemed "programmable" (with programmer art, of course). Noia played a bit and saw future in it, the whole team felt we could develop it! Unfortunately, Silva had to wait a bit more to start composing, as it's hard to understand how the game feels at this point. 

This stage took us about 3-4 hours

3) Developing

Well, then we sitted on those chairs and worked the hell out of it!

4) About the game

We named our game "Cis & Dis vs. The Beat", being Cis and Dis our main characters who flee from the Beat, this huge and round purple alien like creature. Both players have to work together and press the right commands at the right time to make both of them flee from the monster.

Too many misses, and The Beat will grab you and shake you 'til you die. That's right, The Beat is not a bad monster, it's just... uncomprehended, and owner of this giant golden heart. Poor him, just willing to spread some love! Cis & Dis are a small joke with systole and diastole, the main times inside the heart in which the heart expels and refills itself with blood. The game was done in pixel art for a more arcade feel and the music, well, it's full of 8bit and 90's chiptune elements to keep the beat flowing. 

5) Main problems

We had lots of problems to find out who the main characters were. Midio was pulling his hair out all the time. Noia had trouble to make sure the game was fun enough, he created a beat generator using javascript to make sure the notes of the music would match the notes Silva was composing. Camis and Trevis, well, they always have enough problems programming and avoiding the bugs, and Silva had to find out what direction to take as soon as we had a small playable prototype (that's always risky!)

      (Yes, our desks are messy, but we 100% guarantee the deodorant and taken showers)

6) The main result

We are quite glad to accomplish such result with a small group with the little time we had, and we even managed to take showers and have lunch/dinner properly! At the end of the 48h period, by checking people's reaction to our gameplay video and the demo with Camis and Trevis playing live, we were sure we achieved a funny and well, at least a tiny bit memorable experience!

The game is on Kongregate, you can PLAY IT HERE. The game is also on Newgrounds, PLAY IT HERE You can check our GGJ's page at THIS LINK as well.

There were posts talking about it on Kotaku and Gamesfoda (sorry, PT-BR only), and there are lots of people playing it! We'll post soon some of our timelapses videos showing how our screens (and all of us) looked like while we developed Cis & Dis. We hope you enjoyed the post :)