It’s that time again. So the day actually started out with an exam, with the Thing Auction not happening till about 1pm. And the only members of the team were myself and Hal.

For the Tarantino fans out there, you’ll probably guess what our team name is referring to. 

GHOST TRAIN STAMPEDE! Better words than before, that’s for sure.

Here are some basic designs that I drew to make sense of the idea I had.

Game Screen. The player has to dig underground to run from the Ghost Train. But the Ghost Train don’t need no stinkin’ rails, so it follows them under.

A list of game objects, I go into some detail on them later.

What the dangers are in the game, and what are the on screen elements.

What is the Ghost Train capable of. However, you cannot truly predict the Ghost Train’s actions. 

Stuff the player can do.

General game rules.

This was a basic class hierarchy that I designed later to fix some of the issues, however, we never implemented it.

Around 6pm, time for pizza!

So about an hour later I had to go home because I was mentally fatigued. A lack of sleep the previous night, plus an exam in the morning, and then this; I could not think straight. I feel terrible about leaving Hal on his own though. I came back at around 4.30am to help out.

Hal holding down the fort at 5am.

At around 6am, even with my nap from 7pm to 4am; both myself and Hal were beyond knackered and barely had any enthusiasm to want to continue. And between a choice of staying till 1pm and desperately try and add everything we originally wanted, or just going home; we picked the latter.

On the way home, took this picture from just just outside the Staff House at 6am.

What I learned from this TTG:

1. Doing a game jam on the same day as an exam is probably a bad idea, especially when you’ve had barely any sleep.

2. The camera on my phone is probably better than my actual camera.

3. I’m still a novice when it comes to programming.

4. Hal and I have significantly different programming styles.

5. Define class hierarchies before building the game.

6. Bring actual food, not a couple of packets of crisps.

7. Keep it simple, then add stuff later.

It kinda sucks we left early, but it probably would have sucked more if we stayed there the entire event and had a mostly busted idea to show for it. That being said, both myself and Hal have cool ideas in mind for what we could do with stampeding ghost trains, so I wouldn’t call the idea dead. And at the very least, we both have something to work off.

I’ll write some more posts as soon as I get back home in Ulster. Later.

-Adam