Global GameJam 2010

GlobalGameJam 2010 begins in Perth a few hours (it has started elsewhere in the future world that is GMT+>8). I am crazy excited like it’s Christmas Eve 15 years ago. Hmm make that 20 years ago

Anyway I have some thoughts on how I want to approach it this year.

Make a COMPLETE game. (including engine and tools as appropriate).

I’d love to see and create some games this year that can stand on their own. IE that we could stick on a website (for in browser play or download) and actually say that they are finished products. Games that someone in some universe might spend $5 to purchase or $15 to buy the extended version (more content only).

Games that we can take and extend after the fact.

My own games suffer from this a lot. Ladybug Garden and Troll in particular were both ‘complete’ to the point that I’d implemented most of the features I wanted and managed to tack on 10-15 minutes of gameplay. But I’d rather it was an hour of gameplay, or 20 minutes that left you insanely wanting to know what happens next.

Achieving this level of ‘completeness’ requires a better focus on tools, and a better balance of developing the tech vs developing the game. For example I think having someone in the team actually spending some chunk of time writing story and dialog etc would make for a more interesting end product (If that’s the type of game you’re making). Same goes for tools. If you spend 5 hours hacking in 20 minutes of  ‘campaign’ (with all kinds of hard coding and workarounds) then making the next 40 minutes of the campaign is going to slay you. If you can manage to make a great little suite of tools in 10 hours, and from then on can make an hour of content per hour of dev, that is freaking sweet. Whether there is time for this or not remains to be seen.

If you end up with hacky code that is not extensible (IE our Under One Roof from last years Global GameJam) then the product will end its life there. The prospect of having UOR on iPhone or as a flash game is very compelling to me and it pains me that we haven’t done it yet. But rewriting the game from scratch because it’s utterly unportable is really hard to swallow, especially when there are sooo many other ideas vying for attention and development time.

Basically I think the point I’m trying to make, distilled, is:
Make a product that can have a lifetime, not a something throwaway for the purposes of the challenge.

In order to achieve this I think we should be very wary of feature creep and scope.

The other issue, to confuse matters even more, is that a few of us (notable Kranzky, it was his idea) are planning on learning flash during the gamejam (about time, yes). This means more time scrolling through documentation and less time banging on the keyboard.

It’s going to be a blur.

Well I hope some of that made sense. Have a great Jam everyone!

Google search for programmers

As I’m sure some people reading this will know, Google ignores most punctuation in search terms.

This means searching for things such as “ruby .one?” or “ruby ||= trick” etc are much less helpful than they’d otherwise be.
(Side note, “.one?” is an array instance method that returns true if the array has exactly one item in it. Ahh ruby, you so crazy.)

Every few months this really pisses me off.

Here is a line from google’s basic search help page:
With some exceptions, punctuation is ignored (that is, you can’t search for @#$%^&*()=+[]\ and other special characters).

And if you follow the link the most interesting of the exceptions is:
Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings, like [ C++ ] or [ C# ] (both are names of programming languages), are not ignored.

Well thankyou google! For some reason this annoys me even more. There is someone who every now and again (every few months? or maybe they’ve only done it once when google first added punctuation rules?) goes in and adds “popular terms”. Well most of my terms aren’t popular! That’s why I’m searching for them!

I just checked Bing and notice the same problem. Anyone know a more thorough search engine for special use cases? (Don’t get me wrong google is great for most of my searches.)

pumpkincrumble.com

Chrystal and I are becoming ovo-lacto-pescatarians (still eat eggs, dairy and seafood) for at least 6 months as a kind of experiment on the viability of doing it longer term.

This is mostly for sustainability reasons (Many animals cost like 8 times their weight in crops, ie if we ate the crops instead we could feed 8 times as many people.) with some humanitarian reasons thrown in (usually after watching a documentary or reading about it

Anyway we’ve set up a blog called Pumpkin Crumble where we’ll post thoughts and photos of stuff we’ve cooked or ordered at restaurants etc. It’s a little bit more interesting and tricky to come up with tasty meals when all the best ingredients are off limits so it should be funtimes ><;

Wish us luck and checkout the blog if you feel like it!

G.Rid – 1 button game entry.

Well I just wrapped up my entry to Gamma 4 – 1 button game competition by adding the required gamepad support.

The game is called G.Rid and is just evolved from the idea that with 1 button and timing you can position crosshairs on a 2d playing field. It is a strange input mechanism but becomes strangely intuitive after a while.

Check out its majesty!

The gameplay could use a lot of tweaking and focus testing to get the difficulty and scoring right. I’ve also had some good suggestions from other rockethands that might improve the fun factor, but I think I’m about ready to wrap it up, submit it and move on. I’ve spent probably around 12-18 hours on it on around 4-5 sessions over 2-3 weeks (I should really track my time better).

Anyway I’m just waiting on confirmation that releasing the game to the public ahead of time isn’t against the rules, then I’ll stick it up here for people to get and have a go. I might also upload the source code for your perusal seeing as it’s ‘neatly’ (lol) in one big file (FYI the source is nothing to write home about, it’s interesting what corners you cut in a project like this.) It’s all python and pygame, as usual, bleh. Note to self, use new tech – excuse this time was that I had no internet for a lot of the time and pygame’s what I had handy.

PS: Would anyone here be particularly grateful for an osx or linux friendly version of the game? The built version is currently for windows but I should be able to knock something up for other OSes if people need.