The sea's dating agency

[Snuti]

This is the first game jam we participate in, my partner and myself. We enjoy developing art and code, and hope to release something one day. For this Jam we have been tinkering with some game ideas for a while, we will see how it turns out.

Keywords:
- Message in a bottle
- Threaded love letters (written by players)
- Words you pick up (to use in your message).
- The player is a hooked fish

The game we are planning have two aspects to it. Users building a short story together. Once it's complete it will be shared between everyone who has collaborated to the story. The gameplay aspect of it is where you play as a hooked fish, swimming around the water looking for words. Be quick so the fisherman doesn't pick you up. Your final goal is to get the message in the bottle and get hauled in by the fisherman. As described earlier, the player now gets to read the message contributed by users and write they're own reply to it.

Follow our progress:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SnutiGames // Both of us
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SnutiGames // Both of us
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wolferaven // Clare
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ecker00 // Christer

We are planning to do a 2D style in Unity3D and working with PHP and MYSQL. We have got our first bit of concept done, take a look.

Have fun everyone

[Snuti]

Doing 2D in unity was an unexpected challenge. For convenience that 2D frameworks usually have I've been trying out the Orthello Framework for Unity3D. It works well, but everything is different! So far having problems getting sprites to animate, which should be pretty basic. Guess it only takes a bit of time to get used to. On the other hand we got some sprites ready, will be carrying on tomorrow!

[Snuti]

End of day 2 here, making some progress now. Few graphics and basic movement in place.

Here is a teaser for the night! https://vine.co/v/b9pFP7K33D3
Coming up next: words and message in a bottle!

[btxsqdr]

a team? nice. looking forward to more pictures and a demo

[Snuti]

a team? nice. looking forward to more pictures and a demo

Team yes, the two of us ( @wolferaven and @ecker00 ).

End of day 3:
Got lots of stuff done today, started drawing a shark. Did first take of music. Now you get hauled in by the fisher man if you take too long, you can swim around and pick up words. Got most, if not all of the PHP MySQL server programming done for storing and writing messages. Some basic interface in Unity, doesn't send or recieve anything to server yet but that's for tomorrow! We are enjoying this project a lot.

Soon need to get the game a proper title, not quite sure what to choose.
The working title is "Love".

Here is a screenshot of what is currently looks like.

[Snuti]

Start of Day 5:
Game is almost in a working state, I would share a demo if it wasn't for the fact that users will be putting things into the server when I don't want them to as I'm working. The game is missing some enemies:

- Bit of improvement on the movement system
- Exception handeling on client and server side
- Integrate enemies (art done)
- And lots of other small things

VIDEO: https://vine.co/v/bVAwQQBpq3J

We only really have 1 day left as we are traveling on Sunday, if it doesn't work out we will just have to finish up on monday/tuesday.

[Snuti]

End of Day 5:
Finished almost all the loose ends today, done quite a bit of polishing. Just a few things left for tomorrow!

As you can see in the picture, the words follow the fish and all. Everything seems to work with the server, sending and receiving stories, even handling lost connections.

[AnomalousUnderdog]

Dammit, I forgot about Orthello. Maybe I should try it out quick. How's your experience with it?

[Snuti]

Dammit, I forgot about Orthello. Maybe I should try it out quick. How's your experience with it?

This is the first time I'm doing 2D in Unity, Orthello framework have some great advantages which makes things quicker and simpler. But it was quite overwhelming and found it very messy in the end, couldn't do things the way I would usually do it. So I ended up with a hybrid solution, where most my static art is via Orthello Framework and more advanced objects is just manually coded in Unity.

[Snuti]

Day 6: We're done!

So proud to actually finish this jam, which is also our first jam. Been a lot of late nights working this week, but here it is.

http://snuti.net/love/
(hopefully it actually works)

Will be writing a blog entry later in the week about our process, now time for some rest..