Tag Game Jam

Entries 5 Total

Global Game Jam 2011

Feb 3, ’11 1:25 PM

My first game jam experience was last year’s Global Game Jam, and I’m happy to announce that one year out I did it again! I’ve gone to a number of smaller jams over the past year, and was much more confidant that I knew what I was getting into this time around.

One of the achievements this year was to build a game using aggregated data. After Friday’s video keynote and kickoff meeting, the first idea I pitched was a trading card game where the deck is built from the list of people you follow on twitter. While that game didn’t gain enough traction to win a team, other jammers did grab on to the idea of twitter integration. My friend Ryan came up with a pitch of his own, and a platformer originally pitched as TwitAssassin came to life as @TwitApocalypse!

TwitApocalypse has a pretty silly premise: You are the grim reaper, and you have overslept the end of the world. Upon waking, you must use twitter to find and eliminate the survivors. Based on the idea of culling the people you don’t care about from your twitter list, the goal of the game is to traverse a platformer level and gruesomely destroy your friends. The game tracks who has tweeted most recently, and gives you a ‘Kill List’ of recent tweeters—These are your priority targets, and you get a bonus for taking them out. Killing somebody not on your list results in a penalty.

We had an awesome group of people working on this project: Ryan Kahn, Darius Kazemi and Imran Malek handled the programming; Shervin Ghaemmaghami served as our voice actor and narrative designer; Vytenis Krukonis and I took care of the art; and audio genius Akash Thakkar came on mid-Saturday to help us with sound and music. It was a great group, and I hope to continue working with this team on future projects.

Just as last year gave me an opportunity to stretch my musical skills, this game jam saw me doing my first ever pixel art animations. While previous projects had involved some pixel art, I’d never tackled anything as complex as our grim reaper player character. Despite my lack of experience I am extremely happy with how it turned out, and I will post an animation demo of the character soon. In the meantime, you can check out some of @Death’s poses there to the left.

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Parallax & CSS3

Jan 8, ’11 2:19 PM

I’m spending the bulk of this weekend at the HTML5 Tools Jam organized by my friends Darren & Darius of Boston Game Jams. I am working towards adding parallaxing background support to the ALES level editor for the Akihabara HTML5 game engine. I have the benefit of direct access to the creators of ALES, the aforementioned Darren Torpey & Darius Kazemi, but my first goal didn’t even involve Akihabara: I just wanted to see if there was a way to use CSS3′s support for multiple backgrounds to create a parallax effect within a div. As you can see above (if you’re using Chrome, Safari or Opera), it does!

The above div contains two .png background images with a repeat-x property specified. Just as you define multiple backgrounds through comma-separated url() statements, so can you change the position of all background images within a div by using JavaScript to pass comma-separated background positions. In this case I’m using setInterval to quickly create a continuous animation:

setInterval(function() {
    pos1+=4;
    pos2+=1;
    $('#css3parallaxdemo').animate({
      'background-position': pos1+'% bottom,'+pos2+'% bottom'
    },20, 'linear');
}, 20);

The easy part done, I am looking forward to diving into ALES. It’s doubtful I will be able to get full two-dimensional parallax motion ready by the end of the weekend due to other commitments, but many other people here are also working on ALES and I’m looking forward to seeing where the platform goes. (I recommend taking a look at Ryan Kahn’s Akihabara plugins system as an example of awesome recent developments.)

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RAAJOCBDFOTLSOTS

Feb 21, ’10 11:41 PM

This weekend I participated in another Game Jam, this one organized by Darius Kazemi and Emily Daniels and hosted at the DINO/Sprout space near Davis in Somerville between Saturday morning and Sunday evening evening. I teamed up with Michael Carriere to make a fun little platformer, and to try my hand at some new kinds of pixel art. The game we came up with is called Run around and jump on cars but don’t fall off the left side of the screen!,* created in roughly 36 hour by Michael and myself with some great environment assets contributed by Emily Garfield.

The project is built in a flash framework called Flixel, so you can try RAAJOCBDFOTLSOTS online: just click on the image. As somebody (possibly Darius) put it, Game Jams aren’t the place for win states, so just do as the title tells you and enjoy the game!**

Run around and jump on cars but don't fall off the left side of the screen!

*Our development process, while highly democratic, took a decidedly dictatorial turn when Michael came up with this name. I wasn’t about to argue!

**If there aren’t any cars on the screen, use the arrows to run and jump to the right until they respawn.

Update 2/23/09: Emily Daniels has posted a complete list of the projects created at the Dino jam. Everybody had something awesome to show by the end of the weekend, so check out the rest of the games!

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Game Jam 2010 Complete: Quest for Stick!

Jan 31, ’10 9:06 PM

The ShamanPretty worn out from the Global Game Jam this weekend, but I couldn’t have spent the past couple days with better people—or doing cooler things. It is not the most up-to-date build so there will still be quirks, but our game Quest for Stick is now available at the Global Game Jam 2010 Website!

http://globalgamejam.com/2010/quest-stick

Edit, February 1: Jeff has released the most up-to-date build as a .msi installer, which automatically pulls in the required dependencies. If you were having trouble running the game, try the alternative download link on our Game Jam homepage.

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The Global Game Jam

Jan 26, ’10 7:05 AM

As I mentioned before, I will be participating in this weekend’s Global Game Jam. Essentially the video game development community’s answer to the 48 hour film project, the Game Jam is a collaborative game-making effort that will run from 5pm on Friday the 29th through the afternoon of Sunday the 31st, at which point we will have made a video game or died trying. The design constraints and theme of the jam will be announced on Friday, so until we form a team that afternoon I cannot anticipate who I will be working with or what kind of game we will make. That said, I will be jamming with the other folks at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, and they have a hell of a lineup of participants this year—very excited for the weekend. I will be contributing my 2D and 3D skills and limited scripting, as well as taking a first stab at music production and sound design.

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