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!

Blueberry Garden

Just bought and played Blueberry Garden. ($5 on steam). I’d seen a video of it like a year ago so it was a no brainer for $5.
I’ve still got the goosebumps and sad face from my first play. It will require more playing. This is a very strange game and quite unlike anything else. Well worth the $5. I feel strongly that stuff like this should go supported so we see more of it. Music is really nice. Only criticism would be the controls/physics are SLIGHTLY clunky. But it’s pretty great.
FYI: I have only played through once so still have NFI what is going on. Will play more at some point.

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

Scenes from Movies in Unreal 3.0 and CryEngine 2

Game-artist.net ran a competition for artists to recreate a scene from a film using a game engine. Worth a look.

Serenity's Hanger

via Kotaku

“Love” indie MMO type thing

Here’s an awesome gameplay video of “Love” as narrated by its (sole) developer.
Looks like a really interesting project.

http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/gameplay_video.html

PS: You should totally check out the tools video as well. Just watching it now and it’s awesome.

Some info regarding wiiware profit model for developers.

Basically games need to sell an initial cutoff amount before nintendo will start ponying up royalties. The numbers are quite low though and once you break the figure you apparently get back paid for the past sales. /shrug.

Article at Kotaku.

Source engine pwned.

So after the 90th time of going insane from source engine games (tf2 this time) going batshit loco when you alt-tab or a chat window pops up or you have 2 monitors or ANYTHING I actually went looking for an answer, and found it.
Make a shortcut for the game.
Edit the shortcut and add the following command line switches (except your monitor res ofc):

 -window 1920 1200 -noborder

This does as you’d expect and runs the game in a borderless window. It might incur a small performance hit, but alt-tab is now instant.

Praise the gaming gods.