The first day of the Game Jam is done.

I spent a lot of time really thinking about what I want to make. With the limited time frame (I only have a week!), it’s important to make sure what I set out to do is achievable. Here’s what I’ve decided on so far is:

Game Engine: Ink Over the past few months, I’ve been learning a narrative scripting language called Ink (I’ll make a post all about it in the future on my blog). Having some Ink knowledge already, and given the editor's ability to quickly export a story to the web (which I want for submission), using it for this Jam seems an obvious choice.

Gameplay: Physical / Digital Hybrid
I had a think about games I’ve recently enjoyed, and what systems I could take inspiration from.

Anamnesis by Samantha Leigh is a solo journaling RPG. You play as an individual who has woken up with memory loss and draw tarot cards to create the story of your character’s past and present. As someone who struggles with creative writing, having the tarot steer where the story went and how my character reacted to events was so helpful. I want to create a game mechanic with this in mind.

80 Days by Inkle was an obvious choice: the company that made 80 Days created the scripting language that I’m using! The game adapts Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days as a choose-your-own-adventure story where you travel around the world via thousands of potential routes. I really liked that a lot of choices you make in the game have flow-on effects or call-backs later in the story, and I really liked how each playthrough is a unique experience: the developers joked that they’ve written so much content, there might be scenarios that have never been seen before, and the game came out over 10 years ago! Being realistic, I don’t have the time to make an infinitely replayable game, but I can make sure if someone played the game a few times in a row, it would be a somewhat unique experience.

What I’ve decided on is using a hybrid of digital and physical tools. The story will be digital (written in ink and playable from a browser) but will utilise physical tools like D6 dice and a tarot/card deck to change the story.

I also want the game to be accessible to people that don’t own dice or cards, so a stretch goal would be to implement a randomiser that allows the game to pull cards or roll dice for the player at the click of a button.

Audio and Visual
In terms of visuals, the Export to web function in Ink allows me to embed images inside the story, so I’m considering doing some drawing. It will be very crude, and I won’t be able to make too many, but hopefully enough to break up big chunks of text and visualise important moments in the story. I’m putting this in the stretch goal category for now, but I really want to do this.

For audio, I’m just not going to have any. I don’t know if Ink’s in-built system even has a function to play audio tracks, and even if it does, I don’t think I’ll have to time to find tracks I could use royalty-free and figure out how to implement them.

Wrapping up
So that’s it! I have my engine sorted and the gameplay I want to create. Now I need to think about the actual story… As the gameplay is quite basic, the theme (A Beacon in the Dark) really has to shine through in the story.

You can follow the progress on my blog: kain park.