Story of A Flaneer Gamejam in Cap Ferret

January 25, 2023

min read

Every 3 months, we spend 4 days working together somewhere in France. This time, it was in Cap Ferret:

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As we are working with game studios, we wanted to know better how a game is created.

So we decided to do an 8-hour Gamejam with a 7 people workforce.

From left to right: Jayesh, Paul, Martin, Tom, JR, Arthur and Pauline

Objectives were:

create a functional game
publish the game in a blog post and on social media

We added some constraints:

using Unity software that we provide on our Flaneer machines
each hour, doing a 5 min meeting to talk about work progress
pairing with at least 2 people during the day

Here is what we achieved:

VC simulator

What have we learned:

not building a feature for Flaneer was great. It boosted creativity and left space to discover new things: C#, Unity, Game design
after lunch, work was less productive and motivation slowed down. It might have been better to order some food instead of cooking

Timeline of the Gamejam

9:10: Choosing a game

Game idea table round:

A political figures puppet game
Copycat of the Chrome Dinausor game, be it with the Flaneer logo or a startup
A copy of the worlds-hardest-game with the Flaneer logo

A copy of a classic arcade game: Tetris, Pacman, pong, etc.
Camel Cup with startup theme : Tom brought this board game for the retreat, and the team loved it.

The team chose the Camel Cup game. A warning was raised about the complexity to build this in one day, so rules were drastically simplified to get a first functioning game.

9:30: Product definition

4 tracks. One startup per track. A player starts with 1 million euros to invest. Every turn, a player can choose to buy a 10% stake of any of the startups, but just one per round. Startups will then grow according to dice results.
values increase or decrease randomly with dice. The finish line is 1 billion. The game terminates when a startup reaches it.
the goal is to get the maximum number of shares of the winning startup
single-player game

9:50: Task breakdown

2 teams emerge during the task breakdown, a technical team, and a design team

First goal before lunch:

roll dices, startup moving, ability to invest: JR/Jayesh/Tom
Sketch UI on Photoshop or Figma: Arthur/Pauline/Paul

A lot of pictures during the day: Martin
A blog post draft of the first hours: Martin

Audio: not prioritized for now

Background
buy audio
dice rolling/moving audio
race end audio

11:08: First hour of work overview

The tech team produced a console-based prototype with some bugs

The design team produced some assets on Figma: 4 startup logos, background, font, tracks background, depart icon, one dollar icon

12:21: Second hour of work overview

The design team finished the Figma prototype and started the unity implementation

The tech team resolved the bugs with their POC

2:20: Afternoon task breakdown

After lunch, we decided to switch people between the different teams. Arthur and Tom finished the Unity prototype and the integration of the logic. Paul worked on how to deploy the Unity WebGL application.

JR and Jayesh worked on the audio preparation, while Pauline and Martin worked on a V2 of the game and a landing page while finishing the blog article.

3:32: Third hour of work Overview

Tech team:

finishing the Unity-based game with no logic in it ⏳
integrating console-based prototype logic to Unity ⏳
audio preparation (balance and cropping) ⏳ + integration in the Unity project ⏳
investigating to deploy and host the game on a Flaneer landing page ✅

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Design team:

preparing a V2 to improve the game ❌ → deprioritized / asking for ideas in the blog post
improve AI ❌ → still prioritized
create the Flaneer landing page to host the game ⏳