Sacrifice For Mars
Jam: Siberian Game Jam at Dec. 1, 2018 / Ludum Dare 43.
Theme: „Sacrifices must be made”.
In a near future, world famous businessman and inventor Yelon Muks, founder of such great companies as „Space Y” and „Tuskla Motors”, finally implements his plans of Mars colonization. He's going on the giant „Dragon 3000” space ship with a few hundreds of colonists to the red planet to build a new home for the mankind.
But there is an evil sect named „Mars Two”. Members of this sect also had an idea of Mars colonization in the past, but they failed. And now they truly believe that it's not allowed to mortal man to reach Mars. Dragon-3000 mission is a heresy that they are going to prevent. A squad of sectant soldiers had pursuited and boarded Dragon-3000 with their own shuttle. They destroyed the ship's thermonuclear reactor leaving the space ship without energy.
The only power source left on the Dragon-3000 is a bioreactor that recycles waste products into the electricity. The problem is that there is no waste on the space ship: all colonists are sleeping in their anabiosis capsules and there is nobody to produce any waste. So the only bireactor fuel available is the colonists themself, frozen and packed.
Yelon Muks wakes up and realises that he has a tought mission: he must defeat evil sectants, take his space ship to the Red Planet, and at the same time sacrifice for the energy as few colonists as possible.
The Development Process
This project is our first experience of taking part in the game jam. It was a 36-hours Siberian Game Jam on the December 1st to 2nd, 2018. Our team had met on that event, and our name „And Tak Soider Games” was born there. We were going to make a classical platformer with a mechanics similar to well-known NES Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers, with pixelart graphics, retrowave soundtrack, using a web browser as a platform. The player was controlling Yelon Muks, and was able to run, jump, and pick up and throw things. We planned to make about ten puzzle levels with some sprite-animated cut-scenes.
But then the adventures had begun. Almost no one of us had been on a game jams before. When we had approved the game idea, Anhel started to search the internet for a modern JavaScript game engines, Ivy and Nika begun to watch „How to draw a pixel art” videos, and Di, our composer, had asked: „What do you mean: 'retrowave'?” Yeah, we were literally a dream team 😁️.
No surprise we ran out of time. Many hours were wasted while choosing the game engine, setting up a workflow, setting up the WebPack (who сan like using it at all? 😣️), adding full support of the Tiled editor into the engine, coordinating the graphics style, etc. All that we done was a technological demo that can be found on the GitHub.
Whatever, we liked that jam so much that we decided to take part in the next jam and do all the things right.
The Team
- Antony „Njif” Firsov
- game design, narrative
- Anatoly „Anhel” Griko
- programming
- Dmitry Meven
- characters design and animations
- Nika Bauer
- graphics
- Evelina „Ivy” Mayer
- graphics
- Dmitry „Di” Aldagarov
- music