Blog #00 - Introduction

About us

Hey there. My pal, Praytic, asked me if I'd like to participate in this game jam, and I said, sure, let's do it. While he's busy setting up our project, I was tasked with writing our first blog post.

Let's talk about ourselves a little first, shall we? Our team consists of Praytic, Kvel2D, and myself, Mori. All three of us hail from Russia, and are former classmates, though at the moment we're all located in California.

Praytic and me are Java engineers by profession, working in the noxious environments of enterprise Java development, though that could hardly be called our passion. Kvel, on the other hand, has been up until this point lucky enough to not have dipped his toes into the toxic mess of corporate bullshit. Good for him, I'm envious.

We've all dabbled in various gamedev-related things in the past to some extent, and all being engineers of various caliber, I wouldn't exactly call ourselves amateurs, but I can't say we have anything to show off. This game jam is our proper first foray into both game jams, and gamedev in general.

But enough about us. What did we settle on making?

About our project

Praytic pitched me an idea that I quite liked. Take the core concepts behind automation-centric games like Factorio etc., juggle them a bit, simplify, and put it into a mobile game. This idea immediately appealed to me, because I myself have poured countless hours into tech-modded Minecraft and Factorio, and in the past I've myself pondered about what I could bring to the table if I worked on a game like that.

So that's what we're settling on, a mobile game about automating the heck out of everything, with as many unique twists as we can throw onto it by the deadline.

We've decided to call it Automatic.

Our language of choice for the game itself is Kotlin, using LibGDX for all the game-enginey stuff, as well for it's good cross-platform support.

In addition to that, we want to add a real-time component to the game, so that a player's world can continue to progress (it's a game about automation, after all!) even when they aren't directly playing the game. For that, we're going to have a server-side component written in Rust.

What's happening right now?

We've spent this day rolling ideas back and forth and setting up a bare minimum LibGDX project for us to get something going. Not much else has happened. We all plan to meet up on Saturday and discuss things in more depth, work out the game mechanics that we want, etc.