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.

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.)

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!**

*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!

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.

I got involved with the Game Jam through my participation in the Boston Postmortem IGDA meetings in general, and the Boston Indies independent game development meetup in particular. This past evening I attended a Boston Indies event in which Eitan Glinert of Fire Hose Games discussed the process of submitting their current project, Slam Bolt Scrappers, to the Independent Games Festival competition. Eitan’s presentation had some interesting points that I will be posting in the near future, but for now you should follow @FireHoseGames and check out the Slam Bolt Scrappers site for more information.

Additional shout-outs to Kristina Drzaic, formerly of 2K Australia and now at the once-again-Irrational Games, and Amanda Cosmos, a QA tester at Turbine and generally cool person.