Scott Pilgrim vs the World is pretty fun with some very awesome scenes and sequences. With some cool gamer in-jokes (I loved the the name of the band) and content (is that ninja rhythm game real? If not it really should be…) It obviously plays on the good feeling you get from understanding in-jokes. Thats fine by me. The characters were also pretty cool, none of them being overly annoying. I thought the fight scenes were actually really well done (esp the first), and more satisfying than most ’serious’ fight scenes I’ve seen recently. I also liked the fancy editing with the disjoint cuts and the hat gag. More of that would have been good.

One thing I did feel was that the progression was slightly off or something. Some of the earlier stuff seemed more interesting and exciting than some of the later stuff, when I guess ideally you have the ‘coolness’ factor building throughout. I think I enjoyed the first half considerably more than the second. I guess that might be pretty subjective though. And the Katayanagi Twins sequence was great. Other than that I’m annoyed that Ramona didn’t even get to properly use her weapon (bam!) and that the final boss wasn’t worth 9001 points. (I guess that’d be asking a lot from a ‘gamer’ movie though)

Anyway, if you know your Super Mario enemies and what a triforce is (knowing how to triforce isn’t required) you should probably watch Scott Pilgrim vs The World. I can understand people might find it a bit meh or silly, but I was fine with that. Also if you aren’t keen on Michael Sera you might not like it

Plenty of Fish

You can play it online: here.

This gamejam was more chilled than the past. It seemed like we chose realistic projects on the whole and didn’t stress about staying up without sleep or get too frazzled about finishing everything. We’re becoming seasoned

Thanks so much to Simon Wittber for running things and getting Perth organised yet again, I hope whoever decides to ( or is badgered into) organising future gamejams does even half as good a job. Cheers!

See other entries from around the world here. You can limit games to those made in Perth by selecting the Jam site “Australia – Perth – Different Methods” on the left and clicking Apply.

Check out it's majesy!

A while back I posted about my entry for a one button game competition called G.Rid. I said I’d post the game and source after the judging which I obviously never did.

Anyway I didn’t win (you’d have heard about that!) and only after playing a couple great one button games recently I remembered/decided to finally post my one button game for all to see. So here it is! The source code is in the zip as well (uncommented, it was a limited time competition!)

The game is meant to be on the obfuscated side, where learning what is going on is a bit of the charm. That or I’m too lazy to add instructions. But the only key is space.

Note that the game is built as a windows executable, but if you’re a little techy you can install python and the required python libraries and run it from the source on any platform. (you might need to fiddle with the asset path…)

Download

A growing collection of quotes and links about Interzone Games, Big Collision Games, Michael Turner, Marty Brickey and Greg Chadwell.

The summary as I understand it:

This week, Michael Turner from the US office, came to Australia to take the intellectual property for the game. The game would then be finished by another company in the US.

This is while the company has around $1.6 million of Australian debt which includes unpaid Australian business tax, unpaid payroll tax, unpaid employee wages and entitlements and unpaid employee superannuation.

When Mike was met with questions as to how these debts will be resolved, he left the premises. He then came back that night after dark and changed the locks of the building. He barred employees from their workplace (personal belongings still inside).

This was met with peaceful protest and many questions that went unanswered. Then the media were contacted and the police were called by both parties, etc etc.

Most notable was the climax yesterday where employees were ordered off their own workplace by a spokesperson of the Department of Commerce?!

The link above has many links to news reports please check em out if only to bump up exposure
It was quite surreal seeing it laid out on the ABC News last night. :/

We made “Bored Room” it’s available at http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/bored-room.

How to get slug?

Some things went wrong:

• Tech – We decided before the jam to use flash (without any experience) and quickly found that getting it to do what we wanted (without reliable internet at one stage for docs and tutes) was too much effort. We slipped effortlessly into old habits and used pygame. Note that this decision was made at like 20? 15? hours till deadline :/ Jason did the same but stuck with flash and succeeded with bells on so big props to him.
• Team size – While I think it helped us in the end (we got a lot of work done fast) the team size really caused some slowdown and friction when deciding on an idea. People are different, in a team people need to be unified. Sorry to everyone if I was a main offender in the struggle to get settled on something. I can be a tool like that :/
• Team size 2 – As a large team it felt (at least I felt) like we had more to prove than a smaller team, this further hindered the choosing of an idea.
• Theme - The theme was a bit restrictive and early on we tried too hard to be too clever about it. We should have just used it to get ideas flowing and then been more relaxed about sticking to it.
• Multiplayer – We didn’t want to do a multiplayer game because it’s harder for people to play. I now think we should have said “Who cares? We can play it!” if we really wanted to do a multiplayer game.

Overall I think I took it too seriously and worried too much. Not next time!

I also learned a dirty secret. Non-’programmers’ are making kick-ass games with fantastic tools such as Construct. *Shakes Fist* Put us programmers out of a job will ya?! But seriously I’m all about doing more making games and less making tech so I’ll definitely be checking construct and similar packages out in future. Are there any that can target flash?

I did ended up having good fun in the end and our team did some amazing work in a short time and produced a game that (albeit with some glitches) is fun and funny. Thanks heaps guys and gal in my team! Thanks also to Anthony Sweet who appeared miraculously with burgers and sundaes in our time of need and then vanished into delicious smoke. And thanks especially to Simon Wittber for setting it all up and being the loving father of gamejamming in perth!

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!

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.

On steam it is described as “a relaxing, yet intense experience for people who like soaring through the sky.”  Sums it up kind of well.

Official Site
On Steam

All audio mined out of TF2. Good stuff.
Via Kotaku.

I enjoyed this new one and am sure others will too. Also follow the link after the game to see some interesting monetisation strategies this guys has.

Today I Die.