This will be a short blog post, but a few months back I participated in the Global Game Jam at Lab7 co-working, graciously hosted by the Sacramento Developers Collective. I love Game Jams, not only due to the fact you've made a game in a weekend, but also due to the social aspect. I've met some of my best friends through game jams, they're a great way to meet new and like minded people. What was different and what surprised me about this game jam in particular was the fact that there was a film crew there, interview and filming the proceedings. It was fun having them around! If I had known however I would be on camera, I would have dressed nicer haha. Watch it below to see a reporter call me a coffee zombie:
Roots was this years GGJ's word, and here is my super scientific thought process for coming up with Family Roots: "Roots? Okay how can I turn that into a game. Roots are plants. Plant game? Tree's have roots. Tree game? What's a tree game? What has trees? Gardens, forests, there's like.... family tree's? Oh shit its my turn to pitch."
The game I pitched and ended up making was Family Roots. In Family Roots, it is the players job to investigate a room and figure out the various relations between members of a family. You're given a corkboard, which has a number of faces and names on it. You read notes, look at pictures, and use deduction to try and figure what name goes to what picture on the corkboard and then try to draw relationships between the various people there.
My primary video game inspirations for this game jam project were Return Of The Obra Dinn and A Hand With Many Fingers. Both are game length logic puzzles, where its up to the player to make deductions and solve the games mysteries using the clues set out before them. For Family Roots, I took Obra Dinn's use of having to use deduction to cross reference people's relationships to each other as the main gameplay hook and combined it with A Hand With Many Fingers corkboard, which in this case, in addition to serving as a tool to keep info organized, also serves as a grading mechanism.
For the more personal side of things, another inspiration was my own's family personal history. My paternal father, whom I'm named after, had more than15 children with several different women. Diagraming and tracking who's related to who (i.e., keeping track of the family tree) is something Ive had to do several times, and it seemed ripe to gamify. Anyway, if you're interested, check out the links below!