• Role: Art, Team Lead, Teacher, Programmer
• Tools Used: Unity, Gimp
• Team Size: 4

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Description: Story-time is a simple 2D platformer that takes place on a timeline: things to the left happened before things to the right. The story is of a relationship through time, before it starts, as it is going on, and the moment the two meet. The player begins and ends in the present, exploring the future to the left and the past to the right.

The Story: Our story was designed to be simple yet capture distinct parts of a relationship: uncertainty, simplicity, joy, memories, discouragement, and hope for the future. We also integrated the seasons to mirror the feelings of the text (spring for hope, winter for discouragement, etc.).

• Past:
  • It’s a nice day for a walk
  • She passes me on my walk everyday but I just can’t remember her name
  • I think I want to talk to her…
• Present:
  • Start: Maybe she’d like a flower….yeah, that’s how I’ll say hi…
  • Ending: Hi… my name is Lily… thank you for the flower, it’s very pretty
• Future:
  • I don’t always know what to say when we’re together but I like her and she likes me and that’s enough sometimes
  • She always liked the flower he gave her, it always seemed like he’d put in a lot of effort to find the right one
  • He was always grateful for that little flower
  • This is hard, really hard, but we’ll get through this somehow
  • Sometimes I look back and that’s when I realize we’ve come so far
  • I don’t know what comes next for us, but I’m happy with our now

My Role: This game jam was different for me than most. Instead of diving in and bearing some of the most difficult tasks for our team, I stood back and tutored my teammates. We found a game idea that was within scope of our learning team (a 2D platformer) and set out to learn how to make it.

In addition to teacher, I took on the role of artist, in attempt to leave most of the programming to 2 of the other teammates. The art was kept simple as we had to create 4 times as much (1 for each season) and was all hand-drawn in Gimp. I did end up doing a fair bit of programming in order to get the art to work with the changing of the seasons. The seasons changing code was a simple idea, basically take the players X location, mod by a length, and whenever the result is different, change the seasons. This paired with changing the music, resulted in our timeline effect to show traversing forwards and backwards in time.