GitHub is hosting a game jam for the month of November, and I decided I would participate. So fo the next few weeks I will post an article on my progress so that you can follow along with my endeavor.

Week 1 – Game Ideas

Since the game jam started this week, I spent a few days thinking of different game ideas that I could potentially do. GitHub’s Game Off requires that we make a web-based game loosely built around one or more of the following themes:

• forking
• branching
• cloning
• pushing
• pulling

Below is a list of my ideas as well as the one I decided I would make.

1. A platformer where every so often, the path would fork into 3 paths, one above, one below, and one on the same level. Taking the higher path would result in a more difficult path but result in more points. Dropping down a path would result in a less difficult path but result in less points. Staying on the same path would keep the current difficulty and points.
2. A classic space shoot ’em up game where each weapon was based on the required themes: a weapon that would fork your laser, one that would branch out like lightning, one that would clone yourself to fire twice as many shots, one that would pull enemies into your line of fire, and another that would push your enemies out of your way.
3. A tower defense/puzzle game where each wave moves in a straight line.  You have a certain amount of towers/defense on the map and you must use a limited amount of “fork nodes” to make the wave fork into two directions. The goal would be to eliminate each wave by strategically placing the fork nodes so that the wave gets split up into easier to kill groups.
4. A puzzle game where you must pull blocks (maybe with a grapple gun similar to Zelda)  and push blocks to reach the next level. Similar to the TI-83+ game Blockdude.
5. A maze game with many branching paths.
6. A game involving pushing buttons and pulling levers.
7. A puzzle game where you must clone yourself to solve each puzzle (or unlock clones after X levels).

Decision

After talking with friends about my ideas, I decided that the space shoot ’em up (#2) sounded the most fun to make, so I decided to go ahead and use that one for the game jam.

Feel free to use any of my other ideas if they sound interesting to you for the game jam. I’ll continue posting each week about my progress, so stay tuned.