The Clipper Kids was created for a Synty Studios game jam and this latest release marks my jam submission. This posting is the first of a planned series of Post Mortem postings, discussing the idea, the inner workings of the game, problems I encountered, known bugs, and next steps.

Part 1: The Idea

The jam with the theme "Wait, Are We The Bad Guys?" was announced on 27/04 on the Synty Studios Discord. I didn't have an idea right away and I had never participated in a game jam anyway, so the chance of me throwing something into the competition was unlikely.

Before the jam was announced, I already had thought about building a Syndicate clone, with multiple player characters to switch between and operate on different spots on a map. I also had thought about a Spy vs. Spy like game, where two players try to leave an enclosed space while searching for documents and setting up traps for the other player. So there was already a certain direction in my head, but it needed something more for the flash of inspiration.

One day while casually scrolling through my Facebook stream, I saw a suggestion for an aviation page with an image of the Boeing 314 Clipper plane. I am not an aviation geek at all and to this day, I wonder why Facebook showed me this suggestion, but the image intrigued me. It showed a cutaway drawing of the interior of this flying boat, and I just loved zooming into all the details, just like I love exploring the Synty Studio demo maps. And when I had the Apocalypse bunker demo map open the other day, I had this idea to build a similar map and side-scroller perspective with this flying boat, mixing the more technical control and storage rooms with luxurious passenger facilities.

This was when the idea for The Clipper Kids started to come to life. Initially I thought to have multiple kids rummage through the plane and catch traitors in the act of planting a bomb or sabotaging some systems, using a fully randomised character setup. The captain might be a traitor, the old lady from the 2nd class cabin might be a traitor,... and they're all out and about in places where kids don't necessarily get so easily.

Instead of firing up Unity right away, I tried to structure my approach and identify the first steps I would take:

1. Have a room system, so that the game always knows where players and non-player characters (NPCs) are.
2. Have simple player movement in place, so that the player can navigate through the ship, including showing in which room the player currently is and following with the camera.
3. Have a cut-away option to look into rooms.
4. Get player switching up and running.
5. Have different NPCs, like the captain, the crew (cook, waiters, stewards) and passengers.
6. Keep track of the game time over the course of an imaginary flight.
7. Make interaction possible to open doors, search items, etc.

With this scribbled down, I started working.