Summer STL Game Jam 2011 – Day 2

I picked up another attendee, James Koval, on the way to the Jam today, which set me back by a little, and when we arrived at 10:30 things were in full swing. It was just a year ago at our 8-person GameJam that Scott Petrovich, Sam Coster, and myself arrived on time on Saturday and worked our asses off for over four hours before people started to trickle in. This year the house was full by 10:30! These people are serious about making games!

I didn’t introduce my team in the last post, but it consists of Amanda Walker on art, David McKinney on level design, Robert Reed on programming, and myself on design and programming. The idea we had for our game was a platformer where you would make your way from the beginning of the level to the end, at which point an evil version of yourself would spawn, which follows your exact path and tries to prevent you from making it back to the beginning. This fits the “Twice Upon a Time” theme because your mirror is playing through the level a second time. To make it further fit the theme we went with the idea that a Prince is being chased by a Princess wanting to kiss him. It’s a cutesy premise, which I like, and a girl chasing a guy felt a lot less common in games than a guy chasing a girl.

For having less than 4 hours, we actually got pretty far last night! Thanks to starting from pre-existing freely available technology including the XNA Platformer Starter Kit, the toolset Tiled, and the XNA Tiled importing tool TiledLib, we started the morning with a character running and jumping on platforms and levels created in our editor being drawn on the screen. Collision wasn’t working against our new levels, but that that didn’t take long to implement, and levels and art slowly started filtering in while I began working on the recording of the player’s movements and Robert worked on changing the player’s mechanics and adding ladder support.

I felt like we had made some pretty good progress quickly, so I went around to the other teams to see how they were doing. I had overheard a little bit about each game, but hadn’t actually seen the progress.

My first stop was a team working on a Game Maker game where a character moves through the levels automatically as you click on threats to slow them down or speed them up, allowing the character to safely make his way to the end. The game I was playing seemed nearly complete to me, and it made the – what I had felt was quick – progress that my team had made at this point seem like nothing.

The next team I saw was a three-person group of hardcore C++ programmers that were developing a game where Little Red Riding Hood autonomously tries to make her way to grandma’s house while you place wolves in her way. When I heard that this team was working in C++ I was a little worried about the progress they would make, but even at this early point in the game they already had art being drawn to the screen that was chasing a mouse cursor, so that put my worries at ease.

I was worried about the next team as well. They were using Ruby, something I perceive as a relatively unused language for game development, and didn’t have anything to really show, but they had apparently had built a really cool level editor. A level editor does no good without a game to go along with it, but these mostly Simutronics Employees, so I had faith that they would pull it off.

Around the corner was a team of mostly IDC Projects employees working on an iPhone game in Objective C. The environment they had set up to work in was neat. It was surrounded with devices and the game was up and running on a really nice monitor. They had a bunch of scrolling hills and a motocross dude right in the middle on a virtual iPhone screen. It was pretty weird! I wasn’t sure what to think of it, but they seemed pretty confident that they were going to have something by the end of the jam.

The interesting thing about this team is that 6 IDC Projects employees came to the GameJam with a design ready to work on. Their game is meant to be a two part game where you drive a motocross biker through a course and then try to shoot them down while the replay plays. It’s generally frowned on to come to a GameJam with a game ready, but we’re pretty laid back around here and we’d rather have a community of people hanging out and working on games together than people who don’t want to come because they’re wary of restrictions. What’s cool is that they didn’t even have to modify their design, because it already fit the theme almost perfectly!

The next group was much like the first one in that they already seemed to have a finished game. This 2-man team was working on a game in Flash where the playfield is split horizontally down the middle with a runner on the top screen in “heaven” and a runner on the bottom screen in “hell”. You have to control both at the same time as they automatically run to the right. It already looked beautiful, and again my own sense of progress was humbled by how far just a two-man team had come in the short amount of time.

Because I had been sitting next to our largest team of 8 people I had seen their progress in bits and chunks and never actually took the time to see their game. I knew that they had an awesome starting point for their technology because they were using one of our local developer superstars, Jessie Chounard’s game engine as a base. Their game should end up being darn pretty!

I got back to my desk rearing to go, and continued working throughout the day. For lunch Elonka organized an order of sushi from a nearby super cheap sushi place, Sushi Ai, and while we ate I overheard the rumblings of what sounded like a cooperative meeting of all the various game companies in the area. I only heard bits and pieces, but I know that they discussed getting more local schools involved, bringing more investment dollars to the area, and several other things in hushed tones. This is worth mentioning, because without an event like the GameJam to bring together everyone, it’s highly unlikely that these people would have spoken at all. The magic of the GameJam was working its mojo in unexpected ways, and I have a feeling this is just the beginning.

When I was done eating I put my nose to the grindstone and didn’t even realize the time ticking away. Suddenly it was almost 7:00 and the dinner Riot Games was providing that I was supposed to organize wasn’t planned at all. I asked around for options and someone suggested Getting Pointersauruses. A Pointersaurus is an enormous 28″ pizza from Pointer’s Pizza. I hadn’t had one before and it sounded crazy, so we got 3! The pizzas arrived and they were actually really good! So thanks again to Riot Games for their sponsor dollars! The food was delicious!

When I finished eating I started worrying. It was just a few hours from when we were going to leave, the game played pretty much how it had been pitched, and, frankly, it kind of sucked. It seemed like a good idea, and I knew from the beginning that it would take some seriously good level design to get it to work, but maybe it was a one hit wonder. Maybe that perfect level was too hard to create, and maybe the idea itself just wasn’t that good.

On the way home I decided to throw the theme out of the window and think of ways the design might be improved. An idea struck me that wouldn’t take much work, but felt like it would have a huge impact on how fun the game is. The next day I’d pitch it to the team and we could vote on whether or not it sounded good. What was that idea? You’ll find out tomorrow just like them!

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