BongoJam

This was made at the December 2013 Berlin Mini Game Jam. It’s not really a game, because it has no objective, but just an interactive toy.

Usually when I make a game, I start with an idea of what the game will be about and how. A sort of a “vision”, a direction to follow during the design/implementation. The rest is just trying to get there. This time, though, I took a different approach. One of the ideas I was toying with while meditating about the themes was that the main character would get drunk. That led me to ask myself how to represent that visually: blurry vision, seeing double, the typical tropes. As I started experimenting with those visuals, I decided to discard the original idea for the game, and just experiment with the code. Add stuff to it and see what looks interesting, but without a clear direction.

What I have here is what I describe as an “interactive toy”, it’s a simple dynamic system with some tricks for the visuals, but it hasn’t a meaning or a message to convey, nor does it try to. Playing with it while testing, I was setting myself goals, as a player, like, trying to get a full row or a full column of a colour without that colour anywhere else in the board, or what was the biggest wave I could achieve. These goals are up to you.

Kirill helped me with some ideas about the visuals as well as how to use the sounds. He also provided the colour palette.

Notes: To exit at any time, press “esc”. To switch between fullscreen / windowed, press “f1”.