Hello, Mark Lohmann here. It seems like it was only yesterday that we were talking about "maybe doing something with a snowman competition or something". Hard cut to today, and we're looking at a whole cast of characters with their own backstories, emotions, and literal voices. How did this happen? Well...

Bling Bling The Pumpking King Harvest Pumpking Festival

'twas a beautiful Autumn day when we decided to join the 36th version of GM48. It's a game jam in which you have to make a game in GameMaker in 48 hours. Kyon has been doing the game jam for a long time now, and Matteo and I joined last year, our first game together was Tower Guy. 

Anyway, the theme was 'Watch Them Grow' and we ended up with Bling Bling The Pumpk- okay, I'm not gonna type the whole title again, you can check it out here.
The idea was simple, grow a pumpkin by watering, shaping, and coloring it. Each day there was a different challenge of how the pumpkin had to look. Kyon worked super hard on creating AI that worked on growing their pumpkins in real-time just like the player. 

The best idea we came up with, though, I think, was the ability to sabotage your opponents, especially since the whole vibe of the game was so peaceful. When sabotaged, your opponents would cry a little, and seeing the regret on the faces of streamers (like Nyveon) when that happened was honestly something I'd never forget. 

Wham Wham?

After the game jam, we started talking about our next game and-

(this is where it really started (I'm sorry))

I believe Mark B (yeah, two Marks in 1 team) said something about a reindeer, and then Kyon drew that picture above. A game in which a reindeer with a real human nose would play a big role. Okay, well, we ended up not using that at all and we decided to build upon the concept of our harvest game and make something bigger, better and ... more wintery. (and also, a reindeer will play a big role, but more on that another time)

We needed a new Google Drive folder and one of us just randomly typed in Wham Wham the Snowman-Man. I think that was the moment we were cursed. It was all Wham Wham from then on. Including a theme song:

Matteo, who did a lot of the writing for this game (and Bonte Avond games in general) did a great job of world-building with certain characters, and from there on it was easy to add more. Before we knew it, we were creating a deeply dramatic story of two kings: Bling Bling and Wham Wham. Cut to me sitting on the couch in Kyon's room and watching Matteo and Kyon play out this story with voice-acting, and Kyon doing a solo-opera as Wham Wham. Sometimes I don't even know how my life got to this point, but I'm happy about it every day. 

(first drawing of the bling bling / wham wham saga)

That Pumpkin Hat Person Over There
We decided to keep the pumpkin hat on our main character's head and give them a little more background story too. Sometimes it's hard to really flesh out characters in a game jam because you also want to ... finish the game. That's why it was really nice we took some time to think about 'who is this, and what's their deal'. One of the things that came from this talk was that the main character can only respond to questions and dialogue with thumbs up and/or down. This creates some really funny situations and we can't wait to share these things with y'all.



also we have a yeti named Jeroen:

Thank you for reading this rather lengthy post. We really appreciate all the support and nice words from everyone.
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- Mark Lohmann / everyone from Bonte Avond