 I had an idea for an experimental game jam. Are you familiar with the Exquisite Corpse artist exercise that people do? It's where you take a piece of paper, maybe you fold it into three or four different sections, and one artist starts drawing. At the top you can see there are two folds, fold lines, to make three sections in this photo by Alan Levine of an example. Person started drawing the head, and then they draw some lines that connect to the next segment of paper. Then that person draws, and they don't necessarily see the other part. And then they draw lines that connect and the other person finishes drawing it, and you end up with these really funny, strange, silly drawings that you would never come up with on your own. Oftentimes you'll see monsters created or the art styles will change wildly. It's a really fun way to be creative and collaborate. So I thought, what if game developers did this with a video game? Well, everyone would need to know the engine well so that they could contribute in some way, but designers, artists, musicians, programmers, etc. could all participate because a game needs all of those parts. I kept wondering what would happen? Would it be complete chaos? Would it be a person goes one week, and then they hand it off the next week, and then that person totally subverts it? Would the genre of the game change? I was so curious to see what would happen. So I reached out to the Dragon Ruby Game Toolkit community, a game engine that I've used, and 13 people, including myself, signed up to participate. And the structure we did was this. Everyone gets one week with the game, the week starts on Friday and ends on Friday, so people get a weekend at least to work on it, and it started at the beginning of the new year. We called it the exquisite core, a punny joke on exquisite corpse, kind of like contra-hardcore and that sort of thing. Everyone hated the name because core spelled like that looks a lot like corpse, and drove everyone nuts. So I kicked it off first on December 31st, 2023, and you can see my progress here. I've selected a few different weeks of progress to show in broad strokes how the game progressed, but you can see that I started with a simple top-down shooter. I was going for like vampire survivors, but a little more active, where you actually have to shoot instead of just walking around. And I'm going to scrub forward a little bit in the video, except I just messed it up. I think we're back to my week. So I'll scrub forward, and you can see that you collect these experience chips, and you power up with each new level you reach. So like I'll reach a new level here in a second, and that little spinning triangle I called a familiar, and then a second familiar spawns, and towards the end of my week I added these super enemies, which are green, and then I added the kings, which are those purple enemies, and it was just like a sort of hectic action shooter is what I started with. And so then we handed it off, a couple people went, and they took that and added procedural level generation, the next two people. So this is week three we're looking at here, and you see there's a mini map, we saw the level generating, we've got the core gameplay here, but now we have rooms generating in the walls, and you know, the game starting to shift and morph, where it's no longer this sort of vampire survivors direction I was heading, and it's now more of like a maze survival game. And then what happened is we got a few more routes forward, someone added a spider with creepy leg walking, that has this sort of physics where the player moves, and the player, which was before a hexagon, has been replaced with a spider with a gun on its top, like a sort of spider tank, with real slow intentional movement, and then another person added cards. So instead of your weapons just getting when you level up, you have these cards that you can catch, and we'll see some more card usage in a future week. So now we've moved forward a bit, someone iterated on the UI, let me go back, I messed that up. Working with video in this slide is kind of hard. Yeah, so there's UI here, sorry the video scrubbing is like in the way. But there's UI now, and quite a bit of polish. Person changed the enemies out for ladybug sprites, which gives it a more creepy insect vibe I'd say, and instead of just progressing through the level, there's now multiple levels with different generation, and you see up there, that's an exit to go to the next floor. So you need to collect the key to then proceed to the next floor. And so it's starting to shape up, we've got procedural generation, we've got action, the large enemies changed, then finally this is towards the end of it, we've got much faster movement for the player, and there's a sprint button, the UI has changed a bit, there's some various polish, I'll fast forward, here's the cards in action, I sure wish that I could get this scrubbing bar to go away. But yeah, you can see someone made it so that the shots bounce and you can use the different cards. Let me see if I can get that scrubbing bar to go away. No, I can't. Well, so that's where this ended, was 13 weeks later, 13 participants later, we've got this game where you're this spider progressing through procedurally generated levels, trying to survive, getting experience, getting power ups, changing your cards, there are bombs that you can drop. Let me try to get to those. Actually, I'll show those at the end, I've got a trailer I made. We also landed on a name, which was kind of hard, right? When you have 13 people coming to consensus is challenging, but we landed on a name called Robo Spider Reckoning, because we thought it fit the sort of cheesy B movie vibe from the game that we were going for. And here are my takeaways from doing the project. It was a lot of fun, it was so cool to see how it evolved. It wasn't as chaotic as I thought, and maybe this would change depending on who's participating, but I was like kind of expecting it to be like a bunch of different random game genres being thrown into a game to try to basically prank the past people and future people, but really what happened is people just took the game and moved it forward in a really respectful, thoughtful way and continued to make the game better. If you're going to make it open source, I'd say decide on it in advance. We decided at the end that we will open source it, but I just wish going in we decided at the beginning, so I'm going to have to figure it out at the end. And as you're participating, or as you're putting on an exercise like this, just see where it goes. You could experiment, you could say each person gets a day with it, you could do each person gets a week. Really it's up to however you want to do it. A takeaway I had too is that early code patterns and early game design decisions were really foundational, so like I made it a shooter at the beginning and then that sort of stayed out throughout the whole game. No one like took it and kind of just like subverted that. And one of the rules we did have was, you know, keep moving it forward. Don't just like delete something that someone added, sort of like improv rule of yes and don't just like take what someone did and rip it out. So I think that's, you know, sort of related is. Yeah, you see these, I don't, these things move through also coding it. I started by not using any objects. I was just coding in a functional style. And this really like, this was, I was trying out something new and experimenting and it, you know, then each week someone pick it up and be like, why isn't this using object-oriented programming? And that was a takeaway for me. It was like, don't be too experimental when you're writing code that, you know, 13 other people are going to read. And it's a challenging exercise for absolute beginners to participate in because if you're not familiar with coding, it's really hard to jump into a code base that other people have established and contribute to it. So that's just something to consider. Like as an artist, you could contribute and as a musician, you could add things in. But if you have like 13 programmers of different skill levels participating, and it went much better than I was thinking it would, like everyone was able to contribute meaningfully. But, you know, that's just something to consider is jumping into another person's code base and then learning it and contributing it to it is quite difficult. And that's just something I was reflecting on the entire exercise. So here's a trailer that I threw together that I think captures the evolution in a more concise way. So there is the bomb and, you know, I've thought of this whole thing as a big experiment. We'll see how it goes. Each developer gets one week with the same game. And this is showing the end of the game. There were no rules, no prompts, except the whole, like, continue moving it forward in the spirit of those who came before you. You don't like tear things out, but, you know, you could add things. And here we'll see how it evolves, right? Much like I showed in longer form here. We've got my first week where, you know, the simple game and then people introduce the map. And while we're going through this, I want to thank everyone who participated. So we have Jay Donnelly, Kevin Fisher, Seth, Kota, Mark, Hero, Vlevo, F-3R, Papa Crug, Lwampa, Levi, and Magi. So those, including myself, are the 13 of us who decided let's try this out and see what happens. I hope everyone had fun and it seemed like they did. It's so cool to see it evolve and change and play it and to then each week come back and have fun with it and play the game again. And then finally see where it landed was really, really cool. And glad to have organized it and put this together. So that's RoboSpider Reckoning. We'll let this trailer run out and then I'll just show the game in Chrome and play it a little bit to show it off. Something funny is that like the big enemies get caught on the corners and no one really fixed that. So it's a good strategy to fight those big enemies is get them caught on the corner and kind of shoot them out. And there's those bombs again, which is a really cool weapon. And all those card juice mana, which is the blue bar. And at first you don't regenerate them. So, but eventually you level up it starts to regenerate itself. So you can play it on itch and that's where I'll open it up in the browser and we'll go ahead and play it. It's also open source. So source code's on GitHub. If there's anything you're curious about how it's done or how it was structured, you can check that out there. So let's go over to my browser and we'll zoom in a bit. It's at dragonriders.unite.itch.io slash RoboSpider dash reckoning. I'll put a link in the description and let's go ahead and run it. You can change the difficulty here. I don't know what they do. I just love the name grandma's house for the difficulty. I think that's hilarious. And yeah, we'll start it. I'm going to make it full screen. So the basic controls are WASD move, J's shoot and game pads work too. M pulls up the minimap and you can see that blue dot over in the bottom right. That's where our key is going to be. So we'll get the key and then we'll find the door. Okay. So the door is now in the upper left and we have to find a way to get there. The way the spider moves and the little that the feet make are just such a nice touch, I think. And yeah, the bouncing bullets is hilarious. And it's so neat just seeing like all the little polish, like the little smoke that comes out when you shoot the gun and the way the kickback happens when you shoot. Now I've got a new weapon here. I called this the familiar in the code. I don't know how everyone else is referring to it, but you can spawn them and they spin around you. Yeah, we'll just sit there and take that out. You can sprint with the K button and L and H switch your cards. There's also a healing spell. And yeah, look, the RNG gods were in our favor. The cube is right there. So let's see what we've got. You can also change spells with E and Q, which is helpful. Gotta love the corners. Oh no, I ran out of mana. I died. Let's replay again and see if we can get a little further because there are some really cool power-ups. Something interesting is that no one added music. I was... Yeah, it's just because I know that there are some... I don't know if anyone was musical, actually. But ran out of mana. I guess my best option is to just go a different route. And when they hit you, you lose health, but they die, so you get their mana. So there's a sort of strategy there, too. Let's see. Can we get here? Yeah. All right. All right. Let's go. Let's spawn a couple of these. And now that I'm level two, my mana is regenerating a little bit. You can see that slowly, which is really helpful. Because oh my god, he's getting close. And I got a heal. You have to hold some of the cards to trigger them. Oh, I'm going in the way wrong direction. There's also a way to flip the turret, but I can't remember what it is. Oh, it's F. So if you press the F key, the turret does a 180-degree rotation, which is really helpful. Okay, let's heal this. And let's just take a beeline to the door. We're really close to leveling up. You can see down on the bottom, there's an experience bar. So that when you level up, I'm pretty sure you get new abilities. Who knows what the difficulties do? I'm a little scared. During the development process, it was like, oh, nice. I leveled up. I've got tri-shot. The game was so hard. Like I would have to record video demos for each week so that it was really easy to show to the person taking the project on how the game progressed without having to check out all the past versions in Git. So I recorded all these demos and I just could barely progress. So I think the game's grandma's house is a bit easier. And I'm all for grandma's house. These big bugs have a ton of health. Oh my gosh. Yeah, look at all the XP. Let's spawn some of these. And we'll heal a bit. Yeah, I feel like pretty quickly you get overpowered with all these familiars. And then the mana regen, it's like, you're pretty strong. Let's keep going until I die. I'm having a good run. We'll just keep healing. I think I've beaten the game. So there is a way to beat it. I think it's maybe level 10 is, wow, that was really in my favor. I also, you get, oh yeah, we got it. We have bombs. So this new weapon is a bomb and we'll, oh, I just dropped it. And it explodes, but you can see it dropped like in the wall. So there's a little bit of buggyness, but that's okay. You know, there's going to be bugs. This is, the whole spirit of this is to have fun and not to make a perfect game or a super polished game, but instead move it forward. And there's the door. So, and we've got the key. I'm, I'm having a good run. All right, level eight. Also, one of the members wrote a story, which is on the itch page. So you can read the story, which is super fun. I'm like getting real easy RNG right now. I'll take it because for 13 weeks, I've been getting my butt kicked. So, okay, there's a big boss over there. Big boss is really hard to kill. We'll use a bomb to help with us there. Oh, I could just leave. I think I have the key. Let's, I don't know what that boss even does, to be honest. We'll shoot some shots down there to, I think if you just run into it, it kills you. I actually know that for a fact because I, I did it when making the trailer. Let's just run away. Hey, you win. I was level six, destroyed 49 enemies on the difficulty grandma's house. So hopefully if you, you're interested, you check it out. It was such a fun experiment and experience. And thanks again, everyone who participated. And that's it for rolo spider reckoning, aka exquisite core. Try it yourself. If you got people that might be interested in it and have fun.