From the archive
GameCity Part 2: Idea Game
In autumn 2010, at the GameCity5 festival in Nottingham, Adam Saltsman and the musician Rebecca Mayes made a game in eight hours from ideas and pictures that children drew in the town square.
Semi Secret is an independent publication, not the studio that made these games; this page is an unofficial account written from the public record.
The idea bucket
For two days children and parents drew with chalk, markers and glitter and dropped their work in a bucket. That night over 200 drawings were scanned with help from Matt Patterson, and the scans went into a public GitHub project so anyone could jam along.
The game
Adam picked one of the submitted ideas: a game about a lost thought trying to find its way back. The finished game is a dreamy arena full of hostile daydreams, where you guide your own daydream home to the middle, and every play starts the thoughts in new places. Rebecca's music crossfades between two songs.
An updated build held 34 player thoughts and 110 monster thoughts, every one drawn by a child at the festival.
Take it further
The skeleton, the jam version and the update were all published on GitHub with the list of the children's ideas, so anyone could carry on. One piece of advice from the post for anyone working with children's art: let them use traditional materials, just not glitter.