Global Game Jam Postmortem - "Wavapillar"

Last month, Bounder Games created a game for the 2017 Global Game Jam. The theme was "waves", and what we finally decided on was a game about being a caterpillar, due to their "wave-like" motion. The game is called Wavapillar, and you can play it over at itchio: https://boundergames.itch.io/wavapillar

A Wavapillar match

Overall, the game was a big success - first of all, we finished something, which for me is a huge bonus. Secondly, it was well received by players, netting us quite a few votes at the play party for the jam, but not enough to win. However, there were a lot of places in development of the game where I personally felt I needed a lot of work, and where I learned a lot of lessons.

Brainstorming

The first issue we ran in to was very early, while brainstorming ideas. In the past, I have faced two problems in this area - one, that it took too long, and two, that it resulted in a game idea I was not excited about and which was therefore hard to motivate myself to work on.

In this jam, at first no one had any break out ideas. One designer was pushing us to make light wave physics puzzles, which would probably have been fun to design for but felt very boring to me looking at it from a player perspective. I just couldn't get excited about the idea, but couldn't think of anything better.

Then I came across the idea of a caterpillar's movement. From there, we started building on ideas for control schemes, the sources of fun, and game types. But the same designed just wasn't in to that idea, probably for the valid reason that he couldn't think of a fun way to design puzzles and environments for the idea. This caused us to butt heads a bit. I really struggled between trying to be firm about what I wanted and how I felt, but not being overbearing. In the end, the rest of the team seemed to like the caterpillar idea so that's where we went.

I really struggled in this jam to keep my comments constructive and to not take design decisions and criticisms personally. Part of that was my mental health condition at the time, but it's something I always have to work towards. I plan to look in to effective brainstorming techniques for future jams and concentrate on making sure we have a process for everyone to feel heard and to ensure the final idea is one everyone can run with.

Pixel Art

We decided to go with a pixel art style for Wavapillar, mostly because I wanted to - in my mind, I had this idea that it would match all the gorgeous pixel art games I see on my Twitter feed. However, I'd never really made a pixel art game before, myself working in vector art primarily. I underestimated all the bits and pieces of "getting it right" for pixel art: no scaling, since pixels wouldn't all be the same size; no rotation, since pixels shouldn't be rotated; etc. In the end we broke some of these rules, and should have just dispensed with them for the jam. It was an unnecessary source of stress that I should have let go of early on.

Programming Priorities

On to some things that went well. Despite my emotional and interpersonal issues, I think for once I did a good job with my programming prioritisation for this jam. I concentrated first on getting the caterpillar movement right, since that was the core of the game and the designers would need to test it out and tweak things. It was also the part of this idea's programming which I would be least familiar, since it was heavily physics based and I had not much used the physics system of the engine we were using (Unity). I had to try a few different types of joints to get the effect I wanted for the caterpillar's movement, but in the end I had something that worked pretty well.

Time Management

Our time management for Wavapillar was pretty good compared to my previous few jams. We actually got something finished and uploaded in time, for one thing, though it was a desperate scramble at the end mostly due to internet issues. I still think this is an area that I can improve in, but it's nice to see some progress being made.

Multiplayer

Making a local multiplayer game was amazingly fun. It was so wonderful to see groups of people jostling and shouting good naturedly at eachother. Wavapillar focuses on a deliberately awkward two player control scheme where two players share a controller and control one side of a caterpillar, and compete against another team doing the same. The result is a lot of silly physics fun. The thing we most regret is not having time to properly implement "caterpillar wrestling" as this would have added even more to the final races in close games.

Overall, the jam was a great learning experience and creative break from the norm. I'm looking forward to the next one!

My Big Fat Geek Wedding

Yes folks, I got married at last (okay it was a while ago now I'm slow at posting things)! On October 8th, 2016, I married my partner in crime Roy at a little hotel in Perth, Scotland. As a pair of creative nerds, we decided to go DIY for a lot of our wedding paraphernalia, theming things after our favourite geeky pastimes. While we were putting the wedding together, I made countless google searches for "nerd wedding", "geek wedding", "gamer wedding", and the like. The examples of DIY wedding invitations, favours, decorations, cakes, and everything else were all a huge help to me, so I'm paying it forward and documenting all the crazy bits of our special day!

Save the Dates and Invitations

Our save the dates and invitations were designed to look like quests from World of Warcraft. We made them in Inkscape. The little characters of us were actually created for our game company, Bounder Games, but we used them throughout our wedding designs.

The Rings

I'm not a fan of big flashy rings. A pair of good friends of mine have meteorite wedding rings, so this got me thinking about what else might be out there. Then I discovered that you can get rings made from DINOSAUR BONE. That's right, actual fossilised (actually agatised) ancient behemoths. This "gembone" similar to the normal fossilising process - except in fossilisation, the cells in bone is replaced with ironstone or similar minerals - in agatisation, the cells in the bone are replaced with crystals.

Our rings are made of triceratops gembone, of a lovely warm hue. The second band on the ring is deep sea coral. We pledged our troth with rings containing the remnants of beings who walked the earth over 60 million years ago. That's pretty freaking metal.

The Dress

Roy's mom wanted to have my dress made custom, so I got to help design it. I'm a very big lady, so I needed something that would fit me and my style. I prefer short dresses, so we went with a 50s style dress and I absolutely loved it. My favourite colour is orange and we had an autumn wedding, so the dress had orange accepts everywhere. It ended up being much more "weddingy" than I originally wanted but I'm really glad it was; it felt wonderful to wear on the day.

The Venue

The venue we chose was the Mercure Hotel in Perth, a hotel that used to be a mill. The building featured strong wood pillars and beams, stone walls, and warm colours. It was perfect for an autumn wedding, and scratched my "married in a barn" itch while also feeling very old and Scottish. The room for the reception was perfect - a two story room with an upstairs balcony area where people could go to get away from loud music if they needed a break.

The Ceremony

Our ceremony was conducted by Roy's mother, who is a minister. My parents, not to be left out, played us up the isle - my dad (a blues musician) playing guitar and my mom singing. They did a song my dad wrote simply called his "Happy Song". Roy's brother played along with them.

The ceremony itself was simple - neither of us are religious, so there were no hymns or bible readings. However we both love music and singing, so we decided to have a "hymn" anyway and sang "When I'm 64".

Roy made our orders of service, using the same style as our invitations and save the dates (you will see this style throughout all of our signage, thank you notes, etc).

Finally it came to our vows, which we both wrote ourselves - and they were both geeky and sappy, just how we like things.

The Tables

We themed our tables on our favourite video games, and created our own custom table signage. 

We also had hand made pumpkin centerpieces that my mom made the week before the wedding - she brought all the materials with her all the way from the US.

The Favours

Our wedding favours were another DIY - we decided to do Mario cubes, with chocolate coins inside (as well as a thank you note to our guests for attending).

The Quests

We also used the coins as quest rewards! We had five different quest cards, one of which each guest received on coming in to the reception area after dinner. Each card had three objectives on it, after which the guests were encouraged to take a chocolate coin, and pick up another card if they wanted. The objectives were a variety of silly things designed to get guests chatting and moving around the reception space.

The First Dance

We decided to have our first dance on DDR dance pads. The pads themselves were a wedding gift from my mother. Roy choreographed our dance using Stepmania and DDReam Studio, to the same song I used to propose to him - Home, by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.

The Entertainment

After the first dance, we opened the floor to some more "normal" dancing - but not for long! We later brought back out the dance pads so everyone could give it a try. We also had Rockband later in the night. Finally, upstairs in the balcony area we had an array of board games for people to play if they weren't interested in dancing. This turned out to be a huge hit, and we were really happy - we weren't sure if they would get played at all!

The Guest Book

At first we had more geeky themes planned for our guest book, but in the end we decided to leave it more open to our guests. We got a polaroid camera and a load of goofy props - some game themed, some just silly - and a blank guest book and invited people to snap a photo of themselves with the props, paste it into the guest book, and add a note. Again we were very pleasantly surprised by how much fun people had with the props - they were running around all over the venue with them!

It was an amazing night, and all our nerdy additions were much more successful than we could have hoped. Hopefully this post helps give ideas to other brides or grooms to be! Feel free to ask in the comments if you need more information about how things were made or done.