It'd be interesting to see what everyone is working on, post your progress / .gifs / screenshots / devlog links!
With my wife, we lurked around gamejams for some times without participating. With little to no experience in video-game making we waited for something really inspiring. I am a professional developer (not in game industry) and she is a skillful drawer, so we have the technical base to at least put something to life. For our first gamejam, we wanted something to do for a week-end so we can test the water without committing to a complex project, that's why we released so early.
We heard about the gamejam Friday on the evening, that was a perfect time to begin.
Strangely, seeing the subject inspired to both of us the same notion: Death. The initial brainstorming came from "Dying is the way to meet" to the current "Meeting is the way to die", certainly because it was easier to translate to a simple gamedesign.
The rest of the evening was brainstorm about the game design and sketches of character concepts. If you are really curious, you can see some of our notes here.
Saturday was the day to begin the implementation and digital drawing.
For the implementation I decided to go with a little javascript gameengine I did some time ago as a hobby project to learn HTML canvas. It is not a super good piece of technology but one I am familiar with, so we earned some time here. I also decided from commit one to go with steering behaviours for actor's AI because it is simple, it is appropriate here and I wanted to implement it since I read an article about it.
For the digital drawing Margarita (my wife) chose to go with Photoshop. While she wanted to learn Krita, the idea was also to go with familiar technologies to save time. While the look of survivors and zombies was been found immediately, the guardian was a tough cookie. After thinking of angels, we preferred something without too much of a religious connotation. A fawn, like forest spirit was an interesting candidate !
By the end of the day, we had a functional game with final assets for zombies and survivors and no sound.
Sunday we finished the graphical assets and added a (very) little polish to the game. We also began to search for libre sounds for the audio then though that it was lame to reuse sounds while we have a midi keyboard gathering dust. As we have no decent recording equipment, we improvised an installation using the line-out output of the keyboard and audacity. That's far from perfect but we were tired, not musicians nor sound technician, so I'd say the result is pretty great for something we never done before and we do not have tools. The result being that the project is almost 100% ours (the font is an old GPL one), and we are pretty proud.
It was like all first experiences: too short, too good.
We are eager to see what amazing other ideas you guys have. We already are in love with Fermi Pasteladox.
It is too late for a progress report (as the title of the topic expects), you can always have an automated one on the commit history ;)