Global Game Jam - MasqueRace

I love game jams. A game jam is a crazy creative mess, a high pressure font of ideas and collaboration. From constraints are the greatest concepts born, and fast prototyping allows outlandish, ridiculous things to be tried that you might never be willing to waste time with normally. Game jam games have even been released later as full games, such as Bossa Studios' Surgeon Simulator. And Double Fine have started opening their internal game jam, Amnesia Fortnight, to the public, selling the products and allowing the public to vote on games they like.

My Global Game Jam team Tiny Tales, plus some other shmucks

Recently, I participated in the Global Game Jam with a group of friends and fellow students of Abertay University. The jam theme was a sentence: "We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are." Our brainstorming session based on this topic resulted in tons of crazy ideas, such as "you are a fly", lots of ideas about perception, and even a murder mystery visual novel.

Team brainstorming session!

In the end we decided on a game about masks which change the character's perception of reality and alter the world around you. The game is a multi-player rhythm-based runner for the OUYA, dubbed MasqueRace, similar to Bit Trip Runner. The players changed masks to allow them to pass different obstacles. If an obstacle isn't correctly passed, the player slows down, meaning they cover less distance. The player who covers the most distance by the end of the song is the winner.

Level select screen, with three complete levels and
drop-in/drop-out for all four players.

This game was an absolute blast to make. I had never worked on a multi-player game before, nor one designed as a console experience. It was a challenge, but since it was local multi-player it wasn't technically too difficult. We did encounter a lot of unexpected problems - in particular, the scrolling background was a huge pain, being much more difficult to implement than we expected. However, we learned a lot, and we're all really proud of the result.

In-game, with four players, two with different masks active.

The best part about this game jam, for me, was the end. Seeing a large group of people gathered around our game, four players at a time, up on a huge TV, was an amazing experience. In the past all of my games have been single player only, and this one, while very simple, seems to be the most fun to play so far.

A crowd tries out the game.

We are currently polishing the game up in preparation for a game jam showcase on the 19th. If you happen to be in Dundee, stop by Abertay's Bar One and try out the game that evening! After that, we are considering releasing the game on the OUYA store on a donation payment plan.

J Quest

I'd like to start a new section at the end of my blogs - "J Quest", a challenge to my readers, and an invitation to conversation about the topic discussed in the blog.

This time, I'm inviting you to share your experiences with game jams in the past. Have you participated? If so, what lessons did you learn in doing so? If not, why not, and do you plan to in the future? What advice would those who have tried game jams have to give to those who haven't made the plunge yet?

My next post will introduce my next project, and my plans for my personal studio in the coming months. Look forward to it!

Scottish Game Jame: Post-Project Reflection

The game jam is done at least. After a weekend of fun and learning and meeting new friends, I finally got a good night's sleep and am ready to look back on how things went.

Concept art of our game, but the finished product looks essentially like this.

Our game was a 2D running game in which the hero, Denizen Pop (the Ultimate Mare) must escape being turned into burger meat by a wall of... well, of burger meat. She runs across a surreal landscape, collecting carrots (speed boosts) and foals (bonus points) while avoiding barbecues, hedges, and onions.

The game was rather simple, and the gameplay pretty unoriginal. We didn't have a designer on the team and I think that made things much more difficult for us as a group. None of us were really "idea people" and even this simple idea took us longer to decide on than most of the teams. However, we were able to completely finish our game with time to spare and limited stress, so perhaps this simple idea was best.

For programming, we used Unity. I had never used this engine (or indeed, any engine) before and it was a wonderful experience, especially because Dave was a Unity veteran and was able to teach me. Luckily I was fairly familiar with C#, so it was our scripting language of choice. I was very glad to have Dave's guidance in finagling Unity to 2D, as it wasn't particularly intuitive.

Overall, I learned an absolute ton, made some great new friends, and had a blast. This was an excellent experience, and I suggest anyone interested in making games definitely get involved with a game jam as soon as possible. With only 48 hours of your time (or less, depending on the jam length) you'll end up with a completed game, which generally looks better in a portfolio than an incomplete one no matter how fancy. You'll learn to work with others, often both others of your discipline as well as cross-discipline. You may even learn a new technology, as I did. You'll make new contacts in the industry. Most importantly, you'll have a great time and make memories that will last a lifetime.

If you want to play my game, you can download it here: http://globalgamejam.org/2013/denizen-pop-ultimate-mare

Scottish Game Jam 2013 - Day 2

I didn't feel like I had time to post yesterday in the frantic rush to start coding, but today things are a little calmer, so here I am. I'm participating in the Scottish Game Jam (and Global Game Jam) this year, at the Dundee location at Abertay University. Our theme this year is a heartbeat sound file, plus a bunch of optional constraints that can be used if desired.

The team! We were already a bit tired when this was taken, if you can't tell...

My team consists of two people who were complete strangers yesterday - Miranda (@Fluffgar on Twitter) and Dave (@BigHamm3r on Twitter). Miranda is an artist, a student here at Abertay, and Dave is another programmer. We decided to make a 2D game using Unity. I'm quite excited since I am terrible at using editors and haven't used Unity before, so this will be a great crash course.

Our game is coming along quite nicely. It's rather simple, but that's good for the size of our team, time available to us, and my inexperience. I don't have any of Miranda's awesome art to post yet, but I can show a screencap of the game in the Unity editor.

The platformer without any art assets. That red thing is a wall of death.

So far this experience has been amazing. I don't think we'll have any trouble finishing on time, and it will be great to have another piece of work for my portfolio. I'm almost getting to the point where I can actually CHOOSE what I show off to employers, rather than putting everything in there since I don't have much.