Hey all,

Looks like my Luke 19:10 verse was chosen. I suppose it would be trollish of me not to choose it :-)

In this verse, Jesus is talking to Zacchaeus, a tax collector. Zacchaeus had climbed a tree so he could see Jesus. When Jesus noticed him, he said he wanted to go to his house. I think it's interesting that Zacchaeus came seeking Jesus, but Jesus said His job was to seek and save the lost.

What's standing out to me is that Jesus works through other people to seek out and witness to others about Him to be saved.  The great thing about this is that we get to participate in God's plan to bring salvation to the world. I'll keep ruminating on this as I think of a design.

Peace,
~Kris

Yesterday I went out on a 4 1/2 mile run after work to think on some ideas. I thought of a bunch of ideas; RPG on the story of Zacchaeus, puzzle for believers seeking the lost, and a match-3 game among others. However, the idea that seemed to stand above the others was to do a runner game. The obvious game would be to make a game where you play as Jesus or a believer and run after lost souls to catch. My twist is that you will play as the lost soul, running away from Jesus. As you run you'll accrue sin points.

When Jesus catches you, he will remove your sin points and match it with grace points. This brings in Romans 5:20-21 where it talks about  how sin increased, grace increased. Then, you'll be able to use your grace points to unlock costumes, more characters to run with, and other things.

I have my POC, a basic endless runner type game with obstacles.  The video can be seen here:

https://www.facebook.com/kris.murray.754/videos/10221334575091589/

With the hardmode game taking some time away, I'm going to have to do a bit less than what I was originally thinking.  How much? We'll see as the deadline is just over 7 days away.

Making some good progress on the game. I have the base game and am adding polish to make it funner like things to do, sound FX, and stuff. Not going to share a video this so I can focus my free time to get the most into the game. I found a pack of 6 cartoonish-looking characters from the Unity Asset store that I think are perfect for the game. You'll start with Zach (for Zacchaeus) and then unlock Sheba, Mary, Simon, Priscilla, and then Paul. Each character has their own ability and theme song to give them a unique feel.

I will post you a video later, it is rendering on the background as I speak, but it is a slow process, so could well take couple of hours before I get it all the way to youtube.

Main problem with this game is that I still dont understand what is the principle of Jesus catching you. If I hit obstacles or not, it dont seem to really matter that much. Yes, If I do hit obstacles it seems he catches me even faster, but difference is that hitting obstacles i get 15 point, not hitting them, i end up at 30 points or something, so I dont really get it.

It is also very hard to get those special powers at all due to this, and I actually didnt get to try a single one, although I once did get that gem bar up and it told me to press enter, which I didnt notice until I died already (this one is not on video).

The video brings up some more problems with the game, which mainly has to do with slow machines like mine was while recording. This video is my first play session, but after turning off recording, I took another try since I suspected rfecording was slowing it down a lot, and I was right, I got at least double the speed, making the game finally playable.

Problem while I was recording was that things happened so slow that It was hard to do any quick reaction things.

This slow version however revealed one problem with your game, there was no sound effect telling if you hit an bostacle, which brought me a lot of confusion to the playing, and I didnt quite get how to catch those games until I played it without recording on. It appears, I keep jumping at wrong moment all the time which you cant quite figure out when machine is too slow. However, without recording on, it was clear how the timing should be done and I catched those gems much better and also got that powerbar filled once.

But even without recording on, I still couldnt figure out how to slow down Jesus from catching me, and I still couldnt get further than 40 points I think, and since it didnt seem to make enough difference, I didnt play longer to find out aboutt hose special powers since they were still difficult for me to get to the point to get to activate them.

The gametype is actually somethig I dislike, but I think you did a good job there making a christian theme for that one and were able to integrate it without it seeming like it was stuffed there just to get it christian. no, it felt like it naturally belonged there, so good job on that, although basically the christian message part bit escaped me. But I did like the basic idea of grace gets bigger when more sin is involved and Jesus trying to catch you all the time, regradless how sinful you are.

This game was actually bit difficult to rate on most categories since this similar thing of basically great but actually bit poor was all around in those categories.

To take the christian category, yes, basically you did very good job there, lots of message is there, characters having biblical names, brilliant idea of Jesus chasing you etc.

But in the end, I am very confused about what the message actually was, making it very bad in that sense. So it is like mix of brilliance and crappiness, and this was same situation in some other categories too. If I visit the rating still this evening, I might well change my ratings since this was very hard to decide whether to give high rating or lower rating on some of the categories.

It was nice that music and special abilities changed, and it was nice you got to unlock these characters. Basically same system as in Speedgame hardcore version game of yours, but it works and makes the game better.

Basically only problem with that was that I couldnt figure out how to escape Jesus longer, making me already feel bored while I was chasing enough points for the last two characters.

So basically a great system that enhances the gameplay and makes it longer lastin gexperience, but without figuring out how to get more points in one game, those things are starting to make game rather frustrating.

I also liked how you had these gems to give something more to do than just run and avoid obstacles with that power up system (although I didnt get to try it actually), it was another good idea.

That basically you grammed quite much good into this game, and while I havent yet played the rest of the speedgames, it does look to me that if there havent been some problems in execution of this game, this could well have won the competition. I dont think it is going to win it in its current state, but potential was there definetily.

All in all, I dont like the game genre, but I basically did like what I saw and played, except for the confusion that ruined the fun a lot from me. If I had knew how to slow down Jesus catching me, or perhaps it was just bad design choise, I could have seen myself enjoying this for the whole 20 minutes I played this on the video.

Finally the gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUu6KI3vyF0&feature=youtu.be