The Concept

Our first thematic impulses were to make something with either witchcraft/voodoo or bacteria. This quickly lead to the idea that somebody is ill and must be cured by one or multiple people, possibly using magic. From there we got to our current idea: Two people are ill – their heart rate, body temperature and digestion are either two high or too low – and both try to get healthy before the other one does. To do that, they eat fruits. Each fruit raises or lowers one or two of the aforementioned properties. (To keep it replayable, those effects are randomly decided at the start of each round.) It’s a logic puzzle: The players have to find out what each fruit does by eating them, then look at their current status and figure out which fruits to eat to get healthy. In the end version of the game, there should be neither screen nor keyboard: The players actually eat real fruit with specially made forks that can sense fruit types and wear aprons with LEDs showing their status.

After we got that game idea, we found Pixelate, a “Guitar-Hero-style eating game which detects food you are eating”. We did our own Arduino sketches and fruit resistance experiments, but were heavily inspired by the fork they used.

But enough text – have a few pictures of us working on it over the week!

Working on the Game

The Playtesting Session

On Friday, all the games made this week were put through their paces to find out what works and what should be improved next week. We didn’t have our physical parts ready yet, so the digital prototype I made had to substitute for the full experience. I occasionally tested with people over the week, but never with two people who hadn’t played before – and (in retrospect unsurprisingly) it didn’t go very well: Most people didn’t figure out how the fruits worked. Other complaints were that the feedback is too subtle and/or lacking, that the two players barely interact and that the competition doesn’t put enough pressure on the player. Another thing that didn’t work out well was using fruits: Some people thought those fruits have effects like their real counterparts, while the effects are actually randomized each round.

I talked a lot at the end with Tom Fennewald, who participated in the playtesting sessions. Among other things, he suggested that the basic mechanic of the game is fine and what is really missing is adjustable transparency as difficulty: Show what the fruits actually do to start it out like a tutorial, then slowly make it harder by hiding effects.

We will try this and other ideas that we had next week. I’m looking forward to see where this is going!

Oh, and I definitely learned one thing: I should test things more and earlier.

• One player controls a fighter, walking around and beating up enemies
• The other player controls a ghost, floating around, catching the souls of dead enemies and supporting the fighter with various buffs (using up the soul energy)

That being said, I present:

Gentleman & Ghost

He imagined it as a jump ‘n’ run – which probably needs an editor to be made smoothly. Using a text-based level format might have been the smarter choice, but I decided that I might as well try to figure out Stencyl after seeing a fellow jammer coming up with remarkable results. The next 4 1/2 hours I spent in varying degrees of pain, until I finally decided to drop Stencyl and never ever use it again. (I’m not saying that Stencyl is bad; it’s not. It just has a few problems and is obviously not for me.)

3 1/2 hours left were obviously not enough, even after reducing it to a single screen platformer. I pretty much only finished what you see in the screenshot above, which is a damn shame because the concept is so promising. For obvious reasons I won’t post the prototype, I’d just waste everyone’s time. Instead I’ll give you some cool sprite sheets done by Martin:

So – is this going anywhere? Possibly! Martin and I, we deviated on the focus of the game: He still wants to do a jump ‘n’ run, and I felt the game would be cooler as an arcade single-screen platformer. Martin is now doing his version with a friend, and I’ll link here once they have something to show.

As for me, I might make my arcade version someday.

Protect the Mad Mage

You are an evil mage, and on the verge of completing
the ancient spell that will make you immortal.

There’s only one step left: You have to die – at the
hands of one of the creatures you summoned.

You draw the magic circle and begin the incantations.

You summon the creature. It prepares to strike you.

You prepare to die and to rise again to unhol–

The door is reduced to splinters by the paladin bursting through it.
Killing the monster in one swift blow. Healing you.

Goddamn.

And the spell won’t last forever…

Now one of the players, the Mad Mage, has to kill himself, while the Powerful Paladin has to keep him (and himself) alive until the spell times out.

Sadly in my folly I tried to make it an online multiplayer game, which proved to be a task too daunting for 8 hours, so it was never finished. I’ve learned my lesson!*

You can see the assets on OpenGameArt. Free for use too!

*) It’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever learn my lesson regarding jams and ambitious ideas.

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.

Oh, and some useful facts:

• This time my engine of choice was the Simple and Fast Multimedia Library – great thing!
• Developing editors is hard. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t found this great tutorial on gametuto.com

Here’s a screenshot:

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!

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 without that much experience… Well, I did my presentation and it went fairly well.

After watching the Keynote for this game jam…

…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! :D

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. :D )

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.

Read about it in the next post!

Some afterthoughts

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! :D
• 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!