Quest for the Lost Voices

• Submission #Tasjam Hobart CoderDojo Team

• What is your game?

This is a prototype of a 2d tile platformer exploring game on the Scratch engine.

This game spawned between 4 young minds with the help of three parents and later in the weekend 1 more child and parent. Initially we brainstormed ideas around the keywords"Voices" and "access". We love the idea of developing a futuristic world full of zombies and vampires! We also leaned towards a utopian world of peace and music that was to be disrupted breaking into a morbid dystopian world.

The children decided on three continents and three game levels, however we are flat chat to complete 1 game level together over this time. The three continents hide a music matrix and a recording that must be brought together. We set about drawing the characters on paper, photographing them and rendering them digitally to flesh them out. This gave them a child like look that suited our desire to express a child's voice in our game. One of our team rendered a character in Paint directly onto her Thinkpad, able to animate it with walking , later another young member added bending and collecting movements to this main figure.

In thinking about time constraints we used a pre-existing tile game engine from the Scratch community site that we repurposed for our tile based platformer. In utilising a Scratch remix we are able to promote Tasjam to both the international Scratch and CoderDojo communities who can also remix our game. In fact we intend to keep developing our game together in our monthly CoderDojo meetups. We hope to extend this activity using Scratch further and another replica version in Javascript as parallel projects.

In thinking about lost voices we have a back story around missing voices of children and elderly people, of first nation people and the loss of music currently besieging some remote villagers. These ideas could be amplified using mixes of endangered instruments or songs that will be lost due to generations fast uptake of technologies at the expense of ancient traditions.

Of course were all interested in saving the planet!

Our soundtrack was composed in Garage Band by one of the children. In addition we utilised the recording equipment made available by a sponsor of this games jam. We recorded an introductory voiceover and were able to edit this as separate files to upload into our game. In addition we have single files of grunts and groans a couple of which we managed to integrate as sound effects into the prototype. As well we recorded a single note from each team member in order to ultimately overlay these as tracks that might create a harmonious whole to sync the ideas of groups of voices coming together to save the planet. This idea needs much more development both musically, it also extends our music editing skills in new directions!

Inside each level the protagonist is Xavier who must locate the recorded music and place it into the music matrix both of which must be found and brought together in order to move to the next level. Harry loved to add parkour to his city scape. John developed a map editor after we printed out graph paper and hand filled the intended ground, cactus, sand, forest world details. It turned out that manually editing the details from our hand drawn maps was too hard! The kids loved making the worlds- a bit of Minecraft visionary dejavu no doubt.

Harry says:

"We'd like to add in health packs"

Gameplay Instructions

• Press the Green Flag. Find the recording artefact then pick it up. Take the recording to the generator. Use the arrow keys or WASD to move. Move to next level when the matrix has merged but this is only in the advanced game not currently enabled in this prototype.
• DO NOT FALL OFF THE WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The mechanics of player include use up arrow to jump & left right to move forward or back.