We realised we both had some time off from our other responsibilities a few days before we started and mooted the idea of doing a Game Jam, something neither of us had done before. We have various projects started and never finished so the idea of trying to have something finished - to whatever extent - is what really motivated us. Having had a quick look on the Itch jam calendar page we decided to just do our own thing and impose our own rules. The idea of trying to imagine what the designers of Carcassonne might have come up with while prototyping their game had come to us while playing with family over Christmas a couple of weeks before, therefore this project wouldn't count for a game jam and I suppose is more of a "sprint".  The majority of the work would have to fit into school hours, while childcare wasn't an issue, so we really wanted something simple - Gabe was intimidated by taking the Carcassonne prototype idea on but Maito persuaded him to give it a go.

Day 1

Maito got started researching shape games, we didn't know what Tangram was called but had all the shapes in our memories somewhere.  She started to experiment visually with how they might work in our context.

Gabe was getting started in Unity, we knew we were making square tiles that we'd drag about in a grid... that was enough to keep him busy. Looking back, the basic Snap To Grid we implemented quite early on would go on to influence the aesthetic and feel of the game quite a bit.

By the end of the day we had the basic rules of how the tiles are allowed to sit next to one another implemented and we were proud of ourselves!

Day 2

Going into Day 2 we still thought when different coloured tile made islands that the territory would be shared. At first we thought the islands could be a mix of colours but some tests told us that this would be confusing and not easy to read... then we thought about patterns that might complement the shapes we already had. 

Gabe made an Island Manager script to manage the islands that formed - this would be where the main mechanics of our game would be implemented. 

We really liked the bold look of the tiles on the grid and any patterns smaller than our tiles felt confusing and fussy. Through experiments throughout the day we went from contested islands being shared to being taken by each tile added to them to being flooded by the colour with he most tiles in the island.

Maito worked on some possible colour schemes.

At the end of Day 2 we had a game was playable and managed to get some mates, Hannah and Alex, to play it which of course threw up lots of problems immediately. We stayed up late with Hannah and Alex chatting and playing Carcassonne.

Day 3

We added in extra pieces throughout the day when we realised we might need them in our playtests. We gave players a finite number of tiles to try to give the game some tension and a satisfying ending. Along with fixing various bugs, adding a HUD, menu and title screens,  Gabe added some animation which had felt like it would come under extreme polish at the outset so we were pleased to get that in.

We continued to playtest and experimented with balancing the shapes the player is given. At some point Maito got under her duvet and recorded the sound of Duplo and Lego on her phone which were hastily chopped up in audacity and dropped into Unity.

We pushed to Itch.io and were really proud of what we had!

The next day, Gabe went back in and added Credits and Help pages and then made a quick trailer so we could share the game with our friends...