Over the last two months, Christiaan Janssen and me started a little regular game jam at the moment called the Berlin Game Developers Meet-Up. Basically, we meet up, decide on a theme and then started making small prototypes about it, alone or in small teams. If you are interested in how it all started, the participiant Miguel Angel Alvarez asked us both and did a blog post about it. Here I want to tell you about what I did at the 4 jams so far, though!
Jam #1: Revenge of the Flying Spitballs
On the first jam I grouped up with Norbert Haacks, a game designer I met at the Global Game Jam in January. He came up with the idea: A fight in the classroom, like back in our school days with spitballs and sandwiches, trying not to be seen by the wary teacher. The “flying” is covered by the aerial weaponry, and the revenge part could’ve been (if time didn’t run out for us) that when you are hit, you have limited time for payback and doing extra damage! Sadly I felt the effects of the short timespan we had, and didn’t come very far – at least not far enough for the prototype to be worth an upload. Though development in Flash was pretty fast – I just needed a bit more pre-made classes and helper.
Jam #2: Balls of Steel
This time, I teamed up with the programmer Dominik and artist/programmer Kyrill. (And whew, it is SUCH a huge difference if you aren’t the only programmer in the team. And I guess the experience from the first jam helped me too, but I digress… back to topic!) The theme was “indirect control”, so we thought about controlling the environment in some way. After pondering a few ideas, we went with pseudo-magnetism. You have a little labyrinth-ish level and you’ll navigate the ball through it by placing magnets at the walls and the surroundings of the field, while being cautions not to touch the flames or the mines. Time ran out before we could do another level besides the one we were testing with, but it is playable, fun and it feels like it has potential.
See for yourself: http://dragonlab.de/projects/ballsOfSteel
Jam #3: Ghost Hunter
For this jam, I tried to do something solo to the topic “ghosts”. The idea is that you are a ghost hunter, and are trying to catch ghosts which are invisible to you. You should have various means to detect them (think radar or distance detector), things to attract and repel them, and finally something to catch them. You probably see by reading this description that I havn’t worked out the exact mechanics – well, working alone never did any good to me. So at this jam I mostly got frustrated, chilled, made smalltalk and experimented a bit: http://dragonlab.de/projects/ghosthunter
Jam #4: And They Called Me Mad!
For the 4th jam Dominik and me teamed up again, featuring me as artist (haha). We didn’t like the theme “several contextual actions for one button”, so we tried to make something for the theme “invasion”. We were a bit too ambitious for 4 hours: We wante to make a game where you are a mad scientist trying to take over several strongholds with self-built robots. You have several “roboter recipes” from which you can choose and a material pool from where you can put things into the assembly line to build your robots, which will then start to attack. A bit too much as aforementioned – and so this was the jam Dominik and me decided that 4 hours are definitly too short and we should try something longer.
The future
Since we all agreed that is was most certainly nice, but the 4 hours we had aren’t quite enough for us to produce something meaningful, we decided to raise the duration to 8 or 10 hours. The next jam is this Saturday, and I’m curious how it’ll turn out – I cannot come, sadly. Though: It won’t be the last! Expect more (and with more hours, better) prototypes!
As the theme of this month’s EGP and the name suggest, you don’t do this my mashing franatically on your keyboard, but but by making sounds, recorded by your microphone. I hope you have one.
The dragon will either follow the PITCH of the sounds you make (which I prefer), be it by singing, whistling or by playing an instrument, or the VOLUME (which is fun too, though the game should then rather be called Screaming At Dragons).
I’m ambivalent how this one came out. Gameplay-wise it is not top-notch, and the pitch is often off (especially when not using an instrument), on the other side I think that it shows the key-concept rather well.
I guess I’m (heavily) over 7 days, I didn’t always work day-to-day and didn’t count the time – but since the topic “pitch recognition” wasn’t too easy and required some fiddling with calibration and configuration, not to speak about the keyless interface, the overtime is understandable I guess.
The pitch recognition itself is working fairly well – good enough for a prototype, though I would’ve hoped that it worked better with humming. Oh, well.
For this game I used C++ with my beloved SFML and FMOD as sound framework.
As the theme of this month’s EGP and the name suggest, you don’t do this my mashing franatically on your keyboard, but but by making sounds, recorded by your microphone. I hope you have one.
The dragon will either follow the PITCH of the sounds you make (which I prefer), be it by singing, whistling or by playing an instrument, or the VOLUME (which is fun too, though the game should then rather be called Screaming At Dragons).
Current status is that I don’t have any goals or gameplay yet, only the calibration and the initial control mechanic, so is a mere (but already quite fun) toy.
Next things up will be some things he can collect, and maybe some enemies.
And yeah, so far there are quite some keys which need to be pressed. This will be changed later, too, of course – I already have some great ideas for the GUI.
Well, try it out, make suggestions, leave feedback, have fun and stay tuned, more to come!
Catcher is a game about (surprise!) catching things! Especially geometric forms. (In SPACE!) With two spaceships, here depicted as circles. These two spaceships are connected by an energy line, which you will use to border your enemies and open a dimension rift by closing it – and thereby defeating anything inside! It features over two dozen unique enemies on more than 30 levels.
Among the various things yet to be done, the most notably one is the tutorial. I hope you can get it together alone with a description of the keys and the menu entry “Demo“:
X and C makes your spaceships (the blue circles) flying nearer or farther to each other
The mouse wheel, if you have one, does the same as X and C
Pointing the mouse makes your spaceships turn
Clicking the mouse (left or right) makes your spaceships move
The energy line breaks when
a) one of your spaceships touches an enemy or
b) the energy line crosses another part of the energy line (remember: DON’T CROSS THE STREAMS!)
If the line broke, you can restore it by holding X (so that the spaceships touch each other).
(It is Java Web Start, so no installation or unzipping needed )
While all and every feedback is appreciated, I especially want to know:
How do you think could the controls be improved?
What didn’t make sense to you? What wasn’t clear? What needs to be definitly in the tutorial?
And bonus question: Do you have any ideas regarding new enemies? (This is a bonus question because I don’t know if I will include any new enemies right now, but this will be good to know for the next version )
Ultra-special bonus question: Anyone has an idea for a better name for the game? I’m not sure I’m content with “Catcher”, it seems kind of too general.
So again, it’s been pretty quiet here. Gotta update more often. Two news for now:
EGP: Zero Buttons
I’m working at a game/prototype for the Experimental Gameplay Project again! This time, the theme is ZERO BUTTONS, so we’ve got to use only mouse pointing/moving or alternative ways of input, like the suggested microphone.
I’ve chosen the last one as my weapon of choice, and try to make a horicontal scroller, one of these where you fly through a cave and should not touch the bottom and top – only that in my version you control the ship with either the pitch or the volume of your microphone input!
I would prefer pitch as input method, but there are some issues with determining the pitch of human humming (at least for me), and sadly I cannot whistle. Well, I will get myself a flute and check if purer notes are recognized better.
So far, the calibration screen stands and is working farely well (and is using a little bit more than zero buttons, gonna fix this later) – I will work on a basic gameplay prototype after the weekend!
BIGJam!
And the reason why I cannot start on the weekend is the second news: I’m going to the TIGForums BIGJam! I’m very excited how my second game jam ever will turn out, and whether I will survive one of these 3-hour-jams…
More later on! Stay tuned and expect games!
For the last months it was pretty silent here. So does this mean I turned my back to game development? Actually, no – it just means I am busy with projects bigger than a 7-days-prototype.
The first project I was working on is called Catcher. It began as a university homework and evolved into the first game project I ever started to make and was really determined to finish. Sadly my laptop was stolen, and while I have the latest (playable ) binary, the latest code backup is a bit older. I will have to rework a bit before I can publish it – and a few things like sound, music and polish are still missing entirely.
Furthermore I am working with some friends on an as of now unnamed multiplayer-tower-defense with the working title Netwars, which had reached quite a state but wasn’t yet playable. The thief stole me a month work on that, but since I really like this project I will work hard to make up for it!
And the best thing last: I am working with some students of the Games Academy Berlin on an as yet undisclosed Facebook Flash Game. Fame and fortune, here I come! (I am really excited about that and look forward to present it to all of you!)
And here we go for another (last minute) entry for the Experimental Gameplay Project! This month: Rejection.
Well, it is more a prototype than a game, but I will call it “game” anyway, simply because it sounds better this way.
Anyway, in the game you will be tested if you are good enough for The Job. It is sort of an art game, and it isn’t really good. To say anything more would be a spoiler, only so much: Yes, this game has an end.
Fun facts about the game:
Due to time constraints, I changed the concept at least 3 times. (Which might be the reason why it’s hard to solve. Or why it isn’t any fun. Like, at all.)
Since this is my first plattformer, I learnt much stuff about how they are developed. Or rather, how they aren’t. And when I think about it, it doesn’t really have any platforms, although the engine would allow it. Hu.
None of my recruted-in-a-hurry beta testers could beat the game without help.
Don’t try to insert artsy messages at last minute. It simply doesn’t work.
Edit: Since this prototype wasn’t any fun at all, I decided to stop wasting everyones time and took the download down. I suggest you head over to the fine other games I have here at the blog!
Our final game is about obtaining as many bubbles as you can! You can do this by just peacefully collecting them, as there are many, but soon there won’t be – and then you have to dash at other players and hit them so they drop their bubbles and you (and everyone else, hurry!) can collect them. An interesting (and deceptive) mechanic is that you can go off-screen so that you don’t show, and while hidden, wander, so you deceive players about your real position – and suddenly jump out and get them! Furthermore, you can teleport a few times to the other part of the screen, and doing this while being hidden outside of the screen is a good method to sneak up on the others! (If you have read the post before: There are no alliances anymore, and there is only one kind of ball to collect.)
I suggest you download the version in the “Installation Notes” below, because there are a few bugs fixed – but well, we won’t take down our 48h-state, it is also highly playable.
Your graphics card needs to support Shader 3.0 to play this game, and it is optimized to be played with Xbox 360 controllers. If you don’t have them, download it anyway, it even makes fun without them!
The game is written in C#, with XNA as framework.
Oh, and by the way, here is a Zino Zini wallpaper:
The Team
And here’s our team again, for those of you who skipped the other way-too-lengthy post:
Lars Kokemohr – Programming
Me, Tobias Wehrum – Programming
Daniel Bock – Game Design and Music/Sound
Norbert Haacks – Game Design
Additionally featuring: Phillip Gronek – Q&A Tester, Fun, Red Bull
What will be added soon
A score screen!
A test for Shader 2.0 (yes, 2.0. We want to make it run on 2.0, so stay tuned if you don’t support 3.0!)
Actually, we wanted to add a bunch of other stuff, for example but not limited to: A Splash Start Screen showing our splendid logo (om.nomnom games), a start menu, a credits page, preferences (sound/music on/off), a different mode without time limit, and and and… but time ran out, and since it is playable in the current state, we will only add the things named above for sure.
PS: If you ask where there key, the monkey or the donkey is, well… that is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, and therefore hard to find. (There is none. It got lost somewhere along the way of the development process, and afterwards we felt the game is too much fun to try to press a constraint in there. Earlier the balls collecting the bubbles should’ve become monkeys, but that wouldn’t go with the fine abstract look it has now.)
I’m back! Back from one of the greatest events I ever attended: The Global Game Jam 2010!
In a nutshell: The Global Game Jam is a world wide event where participants meet up in their local locations from 5pm (local time) Friday to 5pm Sunday to make games together. You meet up, brainstorm, present ideas and then teams are formed – mostly out of total strangers. It is interesting and intriguing: You have never seen the people you work with before, and now you are working with them under extreme time pressure, to rapidly prototype a new game. Skills are tested to their limit, friendships are formed, creativity is skyrocketing and sleep is a valid but completly ignorable option.
Our location was at the A MAZE. Interact Festival. The fee was only 20€, and alone all the food and beverages we got were well worth it! A big thanks to Marek Plichta, Jaro Gabski and A MAZE for organizing it! You did a terrific job!
Warming up…
So, I will give you a report how it was for me! When I first entered the room it was taking place, I knew absolutly nobody there. Most of the people were talking german, only a few english. First item on the timetable: We should give really short presentations about ourselves. And wow, there were some great things people were doing! At least five people were from the Games Academy (where I would love to be enlisted too, but I don’t have enough money). And there I was, only having done two presentable projects in total, and having not that much experience… Well, I did my presentation and it didn’t went too bad.
…we finally got the Theme Of This Year: Deception. Our local constraints were to add one of these elements as well: A key, a monkey or a donkey. Then we sat down in groups of two, developing a basic game idea we can present to the others and convince them to take part in our team – or tell others that you like their idea and you want to make it with them! I didn’t get anything complete done, though I had some vague concepts that I liked, but that wasn’t so bad because the others ideas were so interesting that I would’ve ditched my idea anyway, I guess!
Meet the Team!
After a bit of shifting from one person to another, this fine team assembled:
From the left to the right:
Daniel Bock: Game Designer and Musican (and Games Academy student)
Norbert Haacks: Game Designer (and Games Academy student #2)
Me, Tobias Wehrum (not a Games Academy student)
Lars Kokemohr: Graphics Programmer (another Games Academy student. Dang, I’m getting jealous!)
Not shown here: Phillip Gronek who joined later and was mostly occupied with Q&A testing, fun and donating Red Bull to us. He would make a great producer.
(By the way, this fancy light installation was part of the A MAZE. Interact where we actually were sort of an exhibit. It was funny to see people strolling from the exhibition over to us, sometimes retreating at the sight of so many nerds awesome people, sometimes actually looking around in amazement (pun intended) and asking questions. I remember a particular girl stealing my time most charmingly for over 10 minutes.)
The Idea
So, there we were! Norberts idea was as follows: The game consists of four players: Red, Green, Blue and Yellow. Around the field were little bubbles in two colors. Two players are assigned to collect balls of a specific color, but the two remaining got the task to support each one of the others, known to no one but each of them. So why is Blue collecting the same bubbles as you? Does he want to help you getting them? Or is he playing for Yellow, and wants to detain you from getting them? To get the bubbles of another player, you can DAAAASH! at them and they drop some of them, open to everyone to collect! So much for the initial idea. Don’t fall in love too much with it though, because it kind of changed along the way.
Some Impressions
I would love to give you a day-to-day description, but all days blur into one, so I will just give you some random impressions.
At first I thought that it would be hard to divide the work between us two programmers, but it turned out it wasn’t. Most of the graphical stuff I was totally clueless, but code design and game logic are totally my thing, so Lars, our Shader God, was mostly doing the first thing (and how well he did!), while I was doing the latter. Did I mention that we were using XNA and 3d, by the way? I worked about 4 hours XNA before, and neverever did any 3d stuff.
It was very interesting to have game designers in your team. 48 hours are not much, and while programming the game is essential, the result should also be FUN and BALANCED (yikes!) and stuff like that! Having people in the team who always think about this and plan what to do next is so great! Also watching them smile when they see what you just did compensates hours of sleep shortage.
Concerning sleep shortage: Before the Game Jam, I slept for about 10 hours. This was followed by being 21 hours awake (counting since I was awake, not when the game jam started), 4 1/2 hours sleep, 17 1/2 hours working again, 1 hour trying to sleep, and 5 hours up and working frantically to get things done before deadline. So of the 48 hours, I spent about 5 1/2 hours sleeping and 42 1/2 awake. I would’ve never thought I, the late riser in person, could do this! (And afterwards, I slept 24 hours straight. )
Yeah, we’re finished!
So after a lot of designing, making music, eating snacks, programming and not sleeping later, we actually got down to have our game finished in time! Not as far was we wanted to, but that was only because we aimed high.
So let me share some more-or-less-random afterthoughts:
My team was nothing short of awesome. Everyone was really dedicated to finish with a magnificent game, and I think we were the team in Berlin with the fewest sleep. And that’s not even talking about their skills…
I learned that I don’t have to fear 3d programming. Actually, it is fun!
The people I met were great! New friendships, here I come!
My english isn’t too bad. Spontaneously switching to english is no problem at all, only sometimes I miss some vocabulary.
Multivitamin juice is like caffeine, only tasty and without the drawbacks.
It is amazing what you can do in 48 hours. Rapid prototyping is really nice.
The weekend was definitly worth its time! And now, for the game – click on the image above or here to find out where to play it!
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For the 4th jam Dominik and me teamed up again, featuring me as artist (haha). We didn’t like the theme “several contextual actions for one button”, so we tried to make something for the theme “invasion”. We were a bit too ambitious for 4 hours: We wante to make a game where you are a mad scientist trying to take over several strongholds with self-built robots. You have several “roboter recipes” from which you can choose and a material pool from where you can put things into the assembly line to build your robots, which will then start to attack. A bit too much as aforementioned – and so this was the jam Dominik and me decided that 4 hours are definitly too short and we should try something longer.
