Omniludens

Quite a while has passed since the last entry, but now I have a good motivator for a new entry: our Finnish Game Jam 2011 -game called Omniludens (meaning “All-Playing”). Better yet, the game is a nominee for the FGJ 2011 category Best Windows Phone 7 -game!

Omniludens is a 2D platformer puzzle game where you play as an omnipotent creator god. First you create life, then destroy it. The game is available for Windows Phone 7 but we will also port it to other platforms, starting with a Windows -version. The present version can be played with a Windows Phone 7 -emulator. Since it’s a game jam game, and was made in less than 48 hours, lots of tweaking and polishing is still needed, albeit the game does work well already. The UI is still under construction, so here’s a gameplay video to demonstrate how the game works:

Omniludens gameplay video (on YouTube)

The game changed a lot during development, but the basic idea – by our designer Kosti Rytkönen – remained the same. First you create, then annihilate. If you fail at the annihilation, you lose the game. The gameplay and UI were built around this idea iteratively, gradually evolving better and better during the development process. As always with game jam games, we too had a moment of desperation, thinking we’ll never be able to fix a big programming issue in time, but in the middle of saturday night, our awesome programmed dude Olli Alatalo found the tiniest bug, and all was well. The physics still need some tweaking and UI even more, but overall our team is very happy with the resulting game. We will continue developing it further, for we think it still has a lot of unused potential.

The graphic style of Omniludens was originally planned to be cubist, to match one of the achievements set by the Global Game Jam committee. This soon changed to something quite different. Since the working title of the game was “God throws dice”, the god game -idea affected the graphic style very strongly, but we didn’t want to make it into a christian -themed game. In stead, we decided to mix elements from all sorts of religions – flat earth carried by a turtle and elephants, a god hurdling thunderbolts, an almighty god able to create and destroy life, and so on. Very soon, we found ourselves thinking of Monty Python more and more, and deliberately let this show in the graphic design and the story of the game. Unfortunately, most of the great graphics Noora Heiskanen created could not be implemented to the first version of the game, so here’s a picture containing most of them:

The next version of the game will feature a notably better UI and all the graphics that got left out from the original version, plus some smaller changes in the physics and gameplay side. More info on the game can be found on the games’ Global Game Jam -page, and later on on a Facebook fan page. I’ll keep you posted!