Last year, the global game jam was great! But that's perhaps down to the fact I was inebriated for half of it. This year I wanted another shot at it. Unfortunately, the tickets for the Dundee jam sold out within the hour, before I even knew they were available. I was pretty gutted but was considering just doing the jam informally anyway, although it would be more difficult without the facilities and space available at the University.
Fortunately, no such decision had to be made as the lead designer for Pixel Blimp offered a spare ticket. Turned out he was one of the people who jumped at the chance to get multiple tickets for his team as soon as the tickets went live. I had less cause to complain of course, given I could now participate.
Fortunately, no such decision had to be made as the lead designer for Pixel Blimp offered a spare ticket. Turned out he was one of the people who jumped at the chance to get multiple tickets for his team as soon as the tickets went live. I had less cause to complain of course, given I could now participate.
Unfortunately, I had work on the morning of the jam so I was up at 7am. Work was pretty taxing so my mind was already fried prior to the jam, not quite ideal. The idea for the game was also ridiculously ambitious. The designer wanted a game where the surface in contact with the player is the ground, thus dispelling the concept of "down". It was a cool concept and admittedly my eyes were, figuratively speaking, bigger than my stomach. I was certain I understood the problem enough to pull it off. Indeed I'm sure I would be able to given more time to look into it. However such an idea (including the terrain traversal and grappling mechanics that were also present in the design) was just way too much for a 48 hour game jam, even with 3 programmers. Myself and another program worked into the earlier hours of Saturday morning trying to solve the problems we faced but the solutions eluded us as everything we tried revealed new challenges we hadn't considered. With a quarter of the jam gone, we made the call to change the idea. It wasn't an easy decision as it would render a lot of the hard work the artists had put forward useless. The new idea moved away from the gravity changing focus to a focus on more interesting maps for single planar movement, such as stunt jumps and traps.
I worked on creating the basic game flow system and from that made a mock demo where you could select the amount of players and the game would then create that many screens split up correctly and then allow boxes to be moved around using individual game pads. I was pleased with this and even with such a simple demo, I was beginning to look forward to having the game running - I love split screen games and having one to call my own would be awesome.
While myself and the other programmer were working on the gameplay side of things, the third programmer was working on getting the in-game graphics to bring the art assets to life and he was doing a great job, he had some impressive dynamic lights on the go running surprisingly well. Sadly, the 5 year old integrated graphics chip on my laptop wasn't capable of appreciating such stunning graphics, but thankfully I was able to run the gameplay aspect of the game and so could not only develop the game but I got to play it too.
As mechanics started getting implemented an refined, the game started taking shape and I realised how fun it was actually starting to get, which got me excited and helped carry on my enthusiasm to code, battling against the fact I hadn't slept.
With 12 hours to go, I was surprised at close to finishing we actually were. I'm not entirely sure where those 12 hours went, but those hours very quickly changed to 3 hours. It was around that time I finally got around to implementing sound. I was worried about how I was going to go about doing 3D sound with a splitscreen and only one audio listener. However, looking at the audio that was to be implemented, I realised they could all be 2D sounds. Hurray I thought, then myself and the other coder started considering other scenarios and soon realised we still had a problem on our hands, and not a simple one. With 4 players moving about would could effectively have up to 16 simultaneous sounds playing, and also couldn't simply play a sound upon each collision as that would mean up to 32 simultaneous sounds! I didn't even want to think of the horrible distortion that would come from that. We eventually scaled back to only playing the background music, a rolling sound for the players and then event driven sounds such as the player dropping the objective. We also never got around to a start screen so I added a cheeky sprite in front of the camera which I then deactivated upon the start of gameplay.
It wasn't the game we set out to create, and we developed until the last available second. But I am pretty pleased with what we did manage. The game is really quite fun and hectic with 4 players and creates a desirable competitive air. 2D games are the staple of game jams and it's easy to see why, working on a 3D game in such a small amount of time is a difficult task, even with a team 7 people strong, but we did manage to make something that was rather fun and awesome. While I managed to code for 24 hours straight during my last hack, I figured out that I cannot quite manage 48 hours and so during any future jams I may partake in, I will be making sure I get that initial sleep in.
I worked on creating the basic game flow system and from that made a mock demo where you could select the amount of players and the game would then create that many screens split up correctly and then allow boxes to be moved around using individual game pads. I was pleased with this and even with such a simple demo, I was beginning to look forward to having the game running - I love split screen games and having one to call my own would be awesome.
While myself and the other programmer were working on the gameplay side of things, the third programmer was working on getting the in-game graphics to bring the art assets to life and he was doing a great job, he had some impressive dynamic lights on the go running surprisingly well. Sadly, the 5 year old integrated graphics chip on my laptop wasn't capable of appreciating such stunning graphics, but thankfully I was able to run the gameplay aspect of the game and so could not only develop the game but I got to play it too.
As mechanics started getting implemented an refined, the game started taking shape and I realised how fun it was actually starting to get, which got me excited and helped carry on my enthusiasm to code, battling against the fact I hadn't slept.
With 12 hours to go, I was surprised at close to finishing we actually were. I'm not entirely sure where those 12 hours went, but those hours very quickly changed to 3 hours. It was around that time I finally got around to implementing sound. I was worried about how I was going to go about doing 3D sound with a splitscreen and only one audio listener. However, looking at the audio that was to be implemented, I realised they could all be 2D sounds. Hurray I thought, then myself and the other coder started considering other scenarios and soon realised we still had a problem on our hands, and not a simple one. With 4 players moving about would could effectively have up to 16 simultaneous sounds playing, and also couldn't simply play a sound upon each collision as that would mean up to 32 simultaneous sounds! I didn't even want to think of the horrible distortion that would come from that. We eventually scaled back to only playing the background music, a rolling sound for the players and then event driven sounds such as the player dropping the objective. We also never got around to a start screen so I added a cheeky sprite in front of the camera which I then deactivated upon the start of gameplay.
It wasn't the game we set out to create, and we developed until the last available second. But I am pretty pleased with what we did manage. The game is really quite fun and hectic with 4 players and creates a desirable competitive air. 2D games are the staple of game jams and it's easy to see why, working on a 3D game in such a small amount of time is a difficult task, even with a team 7 people strong, but we did manage to make something that was rather fun and awesome. While I managed to code for 24 hours straight during my last hack, I figured out that I cannot quite manage 48 hours and so during any future jams I may partake in, I will be making sure I get that initial sleep in.
RSS Feed