UA Game Jam!

03/28/15

By the time of this post, UA Game Jam will have started! The theme? Farm. It's a good theme. In the gaming world it has multiple meanings. Good job, Helen and Dylan for coming up with a good theme for this semester's Game Jam.

Having known the theme in advance, I can not compete in this semester's game jam like last semester. But that's okay, I will still work on game stuff, and the best way to do that is to make a game prototype.

What am I thinking of right now? I really want to try to make a game about making games. Like, for real games. Basically, make an IDE for making games that is itself designed like a game. I'm thinking for a beginning prototype it can be an impress.js presentation with potential for high interactivity but really only showing off specific prototypes and tech demos I make throughout game jam.

In the long run, I'd like the presentation to have a large variety of HTML5 library options, with lots of real problems being attempted to be solved in each one and one of the user's choosing. But right now? Crafty. And maybe also impress.js, considering it'll be running on that.

A means of interactively documentation my game creation would be incredibly valuable, though. I could define my knowledge-space and explore that definition to expand it. I'm not exactly sure the best way to go about that, but an interactive slide seems like a good start.

If I could really get a prototype going for this, I think it will truly lead to something magnificient. A real, expandable game-making game is a self-seeing lens that could improve itself. Add some layer of multiplayer to it, and one could gamify the collaboration of making games. Aka, of doing work. The games could be about anything: real work, real problems, plain entertainment....

Gamification is still in its infancy. A lot of what I see is adding skinner-boxes to currently enmeshed systems. I'm interested in a system where players create real value that is a well-designed game.

I know isolated examples exist already, but I think a game about making such systems could result in an exponential explosion of well-defined systems that do their job well. Constantly iterated, evaluated, poked, prodded, exploited, and patched.

I need to start with something.