GGJ 2016 - Cockamimey!

This past weekend was the Global Game Jam, a 48 hour blitz of game development & creation.  Participants can jam out to the yearly theme at one of hundreds of Jam sites from around the world.  First time and aspiring game developers meld with the local game dev scene to try and to create a playable game within the time limit.

My Jam location this year was at the New England Institute of Technology, having started a tradition with some friends of mine to do a new site each year.  It was a fun, exhausting, and brain melting time, but we were able to finish a pretty polished product within 48 hours.

The theme was "Ritual" and that first night we plopped down in a swimming pool in our hotel to do some aquatic brainstorming.  Floating around and throwing out every idea we could think of related to Ritual, we finally settled on doing a game about "Mating Rituals".  We knew we wanted to make a Gear VR game, so we settled on a game about Birds Dancing in order to win a mate.  Thus Cockamimey was born!

Cockamimey is a Simon Says type of game where you have to watch a competing bird, and copy their head movements and add your own to the chain in order to win the affection of the mate bird.  Players look around in VR and must watch carefully so they can mimic the moves.  The game was fun to make, despite running into a few hiccups along the way.  Originally we had wanted to do a multiplayer version of this (and we still might), but the first night I needed some additional software installed and the hotel internet was very slow, so I spent 4-5 hours just setting up my development environment before I could even get the Gear VR demo running.




But we did get it all set up, and Saturday was a blast of programming and development.  The other 2 people in the group: Ben & Dawn Taylor, are both phenomenal artists and handled all of the modeling, lighting and effects, and promotional art which was perfect as I handled all of the programming and level design.  One thing we did well was to keep the scope fairly small.  You only have to make six successful moves in a row to win the game, and the demo is short, sweet and gets the idea across.  And it's fun.

We had to keep the game small, and use as few effects as possible, as mobile VR can be rough on phones for rendering and heating.  We'll have to keep most of the scenes small like this, which works because the game consists of only three main characters.

The whole weekend was a blast and it was good to get back into Game development a bit as it has been a while since I've made anything game related.  If you have a Gear VR you can check out Cockamimey on the Google Play Store or at our Global Game Jam page, and if you check it out give us a holler and let us know what you think.

Global Game Jam 2014 - EvoDash - Postmortem

Well it has certainly been a busy week.  This past weekend was the Global Game Jam and what a time that was!  It was a wonderful time creating games alongside a bunch of other talented people.  Fire Hose Games also just did a live stream play through of SBX: Invasion as well today at noon.

So let's start with the Global Game Jam.  It was exciting, it was exhausting, it was all around a good time.  I left for the Jam on Friday and took the Commuter Rail into the city.  The Jam location was at Northeastern University in the Digital Commons (which is quite an impressive area) in the Library.  The site was open for 24 hours a day so I planned to stay for the entire duration and brought a blanket and neck pillow accordingly.

The first day was a lot of fun, and right at the start I knew I wanted to get our team together and start work asap.  After all, 48 hours is not a lot of time to finish a game.  So during the mingling a group of people kind of came together, and I asked if anyone knew C# and wanted to work in Unity and two of them said they were fine so we set out a group quickly.  The theme was "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." and we grouped in a corner of the library with a white board and started hashing out ideas.

Our final idea that we decided would come to be known as 'EvoDash'.  The concept was that the game was essentially an infinite runner / survival game, that evolves based on the player's actions.  The player also changes based on the way they play as well.

For instance, the player can move through the world by sprinting, jumping and dashing in addition to the normal run.  These actions require endurance, which is a limited, regenerating resource.  As the player jumps during the game, their jump becomes stronger, as the player sprints, their speed increases, and as the player dashes, their dash becomes longer and on a shorter cool down.  However, if they don't use these skills, they will decay down to a minimum over time.

In addition, the world will generate obstacles based on the current stats of the player, so if you jump often, there will be jump obstacles, if you dash often, there will be dashing challenges.  All of this being procedurally generated.  That's the high goal at least.  We accomplished this to a degree for the Jam, but it will certainly take some refinement to fully realize this.

Then we set out to create the game.  We located a table with some screens set up and assembled our workplace.  Our team was comprised of 6 people:

• Lead Designer & Gameplay Programmer...............................Jason (Me)
• Lead & PCG Programmer.....................................................Kevin Cavanaugh
• 2D & UI Artist......................................................................Christian DeSilva
• Musician & SFX Artist..........................................................Harry Lodes
• Programmer & Git Specialist.................................................Jeffrey Robbins
• Programming Assistant..........................................................Jacob Ginsparg

The screens at the tables were extremely nice with adjustable mounts, so we set them up to the side as our script screens.

Kevin and Jacob Programming (note the awesome screen)

My Side of the Table (And Jeff's Foot)

A Selfie of Jeff:

Unfortunately we don't have any pictures of Harry or Christian as they were off by themselves grinding away for most of the weekend.  We didn't really focus on taking pictures or making the video.  We were fairly engrossed in creating the game.

There were a lot of challenges as well.  The first night we had some massive problems with Git integration with Unity.  I'd say over the whole weekend, trying to get Git to work properly with Unity cost us around 5 hours.  And when you only have 42 hours or so after all of the announcements and what not, that's a lot of time.  So, GIT was our number 1 challenge.

Sleep was also tough, the first night I passed out around 6 a.m and slept until 9 a.m and then Sunday Morning I finally let myself sleep from 9 a.m until noon once we at least had a solid build out.  I don't think I've ever stared at scripts for so many consecutive hours, but it was fun (as a rare event!).  Also, on Sunday Night through Monday Morning I slept 14 hours to recuperate.

The experience was amazing and we actually finished a game!  A fellow jammer actually lent us a SNES USB controller to use for testing and EvoDash is a lot of fun on a SNES Controller, by the way.  You can play the game as well on my website.  The controls are there, you just need to have Unity player installed.  I also got used to the 2D Workflow in Unity which is actually very nice!  I'm ten times more comfortable with 2D in Unity now.

For now, we all agreed to evolve the game in our own ways and the idea is that we can take our versions of the game in the future and make a new version that's much better and takes from all our ideas.  So I'll be working on my own version of EvoDash alongside Tzarr.

So THAT was the Global Game Jam, if you like making games and haven't done it yet, set aside the time next year!  I highly recommend it, even if you are new to game development.

In other news, Fire Hose Games, creators of Go Home Dinosaurs and Slam Bolt Scrappers, and recently in the news for their Indie Incubator announcement on Joystiq and the Boston Globe, did a live stream of SBX: Invasion today at noon.  You can check out the video on Twitch.TV.  

It's been a CRAZY weekend, and a lot of fun!  Some friends of mine, Ben Taylor and Dawn Rivers were in the GGJ as well and created Snub Titles, a neat meta game that challenges people to think critically when they review games.  It's pretty interesting so far, I look forward to seeing how it develops.

I should also have a playable build of Tzarr by Friday for Feedback Friday and our goal in February is to have an online multi-player matchmaking system in place.

That's about it for now, but I'm sure you're tired of reading words by now.  Subscribe to the blog to stay in the loop!  Lots of neat stuff is in the works so you won't wanna miss out!

Cheers,

Jason Carter / WakeskaterX

First Look at Tzarr - Global Game Jam 2014!

Good Wednesday!  I've got a video taking a look at the results of week one of production on Tzarr, including the rough basics and turn based game play.  Tzarr is coming along nicely so far, yesterday was tough, as I had a bug that baffled me for the entire day.  Finally I figured out what was wrong and fixed it and wham, everything magically worked exactly like I wanted!

The problem code snippet was this:

As you can see if you click on it, I was setting unit_grid which was the entire 9x9 grid to a shifted version of the move_grid, which was only 7x7 and contained the movement ability of each piece.

But the problem was that I was using different indices so it was rewriting over old sections of the array with 0 when I didn't want it to be.  I was already initializing the unit_grid array to 0s anyway in ClearUnitGrid(); so I just removed that line and everything worked perfectly!

But enough programmer talk, let's take a look at the video on Tzarr:

Honestly the game rules right now need to be changed a lot.  I played a game with myself and it was very easy to stalemate.  I'll be doing extensive play testing and making all sorts of builds to find a good balanced and fun rule set for Tzarr.

In other news, I'll be attending the Global Game Jam this weekend!  I'm super excited, I didn't think I would be able to get in, but because I signed up on the main site, even though they ran out of tickets, the head honcho said I was alright to come.  It's been a while since I've participated in a Jam (Since SBX: Invasion for the GMC Jam January 2013!) so I'm super stoked to get out and meet some cool people and stay up late like a youngster again.

I've been thinking of tons of ideas for all sorts of topics and my work on Tzarr has enabled me to work quickly with C# and Unity.  I think with a good team we could turn out something truly awesome!

Also, I just tried out Infinite Crisis, a MOBA by Turbine Games Inc that's still in Beta, and it's still under NDA so I won't say too much but I'll say this:  Sign up for the Beta, it's fun!

That's all for this update, I'll likely have a large update after the GGJ this weekend with the project my team has created and updates about how it went.

Cheers!

Jason C. / WakeskaterX