Game Designing

Opportunities for designing games.

Global Game Jame 2011 – Theme: Extinction

Posted on by Steven

Global Game Jam Team 2011

48 hours Long | 44 countries participated | 170 locations | 6500 participants | almost 1500 games

The Global Game Jam 2011 was last weekend and it was great! We had over 100 jammers at our location and made some great games over the 48 hours. We had not only one keynote speaker (the global one by Keita Takahashi, maker of Katamari) but three! In addition to Keita’s recorded video, we had Scott Jones of “Reviews on the Run” and Kelly Zmak the former President of Radical Entertainment.

After the keynote we were given various icebreakers to meet other people. Then we were told the theme (this year it was Extinction!) and broke into teams to brainstorm game ideas based off of the theme. We had over 20 people pitch the best game ideas and then people joined the teams to make the games pitched (or formed new ones if none of the games were what they were looking for).

I was fortunate enough to work with Jake Birkett and Alex Vostrov, two experienced indie game designers, and two great artists. Together we put together a game called “The Invasion of Giant Planet-Eating Bacteria From Outer Space”. It was a good game, but we felt a tutorial would’ve helped. Alas, in 48 hours time is very limited so we generally told people the tutorial over their shoulder.

Check out all the games people made at globalgamejam.org

Global Game Jam 2011 Coming Soon!

Posted on by Steven

This weekend is the Global Game Jam 2011!  Thousands of developers and game design enthusiasts from all over the world will be coming together to create games in the space of 48 hours.  Trying to hit special achievement goals such as “Based on a True Story” or “Both hands tied behind my back” they will make innovative games that will push boundaries and will also be lots of fun.  During this event they will get to meet new people, both developers in and out of the industry, and get to learn new tools or new roles as they work to fill in any gaps in their teams as not all locations end up with a balance of programmers, artists, sound engineers, and other specialists.

Starting in New Zealand first and ending off with the west coast of North America, it will be a wild ride as thousands of games are uploaded to globalgamejam.org over the course of the weekend.  Check it out as it’s the place to be this January 28-30th!  I know I will be there!

HATKC 3 – Short and Sweet

Posted on by Steven

And finally this level was made on my lunch break as a quick and easy one that can be done in under 5 minutes.

If you want to check it out it takes a few steps:

1. go to the game at: http://www.neopets.com/games/play.phtml?game_id=1252&size=regular&quality=high

2. Click “Level Editor”

3. Select “Load Level”.

4. Select “Paste in”.

5. Copy and paste this code into the box and hit ‘Load’:

6. Close the instructions box.

7. Click the icon at the top center with the picture of the character running with an arrow.

Enjoy!

(Just a quick reminder – I did not program this game, I simply used the level editor to make a level)

Another HATKC Level – Non-linear Daisy

Posted on by Steven

Over the weekend I threw together another level. This one also used the Daisy chain, but I added a non-linear element so you can take different parts of the level in a different order.

Once again, If you want to check it out it takes a few steps:

1. go to the game at: http://www.neopets.com/games/play.phtml?game_id=1252&size=regular&quality=high

2. Click “Level Editor”

3. Select “Load Level”.

4. Select “Paste in”.

5. Copy and paste this code into the box and hit ‘Load’:

6. Close the instructions box.

7. Click the icon at the top center with the picture of the character running with an arrow.

Enjoy!

HATKC – Daisy Chain Level Design

Posted on by Steven

There is a new version out of an old “Hannah and the _____ Caves” Flash Game Series called “Hannah and the Kreludor Caves”. Since they have a nice little level editor to work with I decided to put together a level (which is more like 3 levels) that uses the Daisy Chain Level Design. It’s a simple design concept that I really like. The idea is to have a central location that the player is safe in and then you send them out into danger and then return back to the safe location. This version I find much more forgiving because you can use your rockets to slow your descent so you don’t fall onto nasty objects like the spikes in the picture below.


If you want to check it out it takes a few steps:

1. go to the game at:  http://www.neopets.com/games/play.phtml?game_id=1252&size=regular&quality=high

2. Click “Level Editor”

3. Select “Load Level”.

4. Select “Paste in”.

5. Copy and paste this code into the box and hit ‘Load’:

6. Close the instructions box.

7. Click the icon at the top center with the picture of the character running with an arrow.

Enjoy!

Indie Game: The Movie

Posted on by Steven

So, I came across a link to this awesome preview of “Indie Game: the Movie” courtesy of my MDM Colleague, Dave Marhal.


It’s a documentary about Indie Game Designers. I found it very touching and related quite well to it. I look forward to seeing the full movie when it’s completed in 2011.

Back-Country Skiing

Posted on by Steven

I was fortunate enough to go back-country skiing in the Selkirk Mountain Range this past week. Back-country skiing is really neat because you’re getting to ski in untouched powder snow that is soft, fluffy, and uncrowded to ski in, unlike regular ski hills. Using Alpine-touring skis and fur skins (to give you traction) you hike up to the top of a hill and then switch to downhill mode and ski down. Skiing down is different from on a groomed slope because the snow is so thick it would slow you down to a standstill if you used traditional techniques. So you have to kind of “bounce” your way down the hill. It’s neat because if you’re used to doing blue runs with an occasional black diamond, like me, you find you can do much steeper hills and get a real nice flow to your skiing. It’s lots of fun!

I even got to check out a natural ice cave! It’s quite pretty inside with the sunlight turning the ice shades of blue.

It was a useful trip because it also helped me refine my ideas for a snow-level for a game I’m working on called “Abscond”. It’s a game that uses the “Escape the Room” game motif as a starting point to springboard off into something quite creative and new. I’m planning to use that as a featuring point for my new website design. (coming soon…)

48-Hour Global Game Jam

Posted on by Steven

Gosh the global game jam was fantastic this year! Not only did we have over 100 jam sites, but the jam spread over to 35+ countries from 25 last year. I had the honour of chairing the UBC location in Vancouver this year. With my fantastic team of volunteers, as well as the helpful UBC volunteers, we put on a great site for our participants.

So hold on here – if you haven’t heard of it, the global game jam is an annual event that was started last year by Susan Gold of the International Game Developer’s Association. The idea is to get a bunch of developers in the same area face-to-face and create games in a short, intense game development session: 48 hours to be precise. To make it even better, they are connected via live webcam to other groups of game jammers around the world who are all doing the same thing. With the assistance of industry mentors and some volunteers reminding them to eat and sleep they all work on games based on a theme and some constraints. The theme is the same worldwide, while the constraints varying from timezone to timezone and, sometimes even, location to location.

For example, this year’s theme was: Deception. And the constraints for our time zone was to include at least one of the following: Punk, Monk, or Skunk. Meanwhile another timezone had something like: Snake, Cake, or lake to be included.

We had some great ideas put forward. My favourite from our location was called “Sleuth“. In Sleuth you were either the punk or the detective. The punk tries to disguise himself as a monk and blend in with the other monks while the detective tries to find the punk before time runs out by lifting off the hoods of all the monks.

This was not a competition (no matter how much all of us North Americans seem to try to make it so) but we still sent everyone home with some industry swag from Big Fish games, Radical Entertainment, UBC, BCIT, and other local sponsors of our location.

One of the big reasons I liked this jam site was because it felt like MY jam site. Why? I love board games and it ain’t a Steven-hosted event without some board games involved. During some of the down times for volunteers when they really just needed to keep an eye on things so they don’t get stolen, we pulled out some board games and got some game playing happening as well. It was awesome! We even kept a few of the live feed watchers watching one game of Catan by zooming in the camera close for a while.

MDM 48-Hour Design Jam

Posted on by Steven

This past weekend I volunteered with some fellow alumni of the Masters of Digital Media Program to host a 48-hour Design Jam for the second and third cohorts of our illustrious MDM Program. Based off of the 48-hour Global Game Jam that we had participated in this past January, we challenged the new students to design a game or animation within 48 hours. This was an exciting experience for them to bond over.

It went really well too. While the one person interested in making an animation ended up joining one of the games groups, many games were made and fun was had by all. I had the fortune of helping out one group who wanted to learn a 3D engine in the 48 hours. I taught them the engine I knew was easy to learn in that time frame which is Blender the open source game engine! They not only took to it really quickly, but they also mastered much more of it than even I have. They were really interested in the modelling, while my knowledge lay mostly in Python. It was interesting to watch them come together and make their game so fast. The lesson that warmed my heart at the end was hearing that they had learned to overcome their fear of having to learn something new in such a short time. They felt they could do it again if they wanted to.