Read about what went down at Moray College’s first ever game jam, which was participated by myself. Enjoy reading about my antics!
Friday 14th March 2014
Today is the start of the Moray Game Jam. I start my journey from Glasgow to Elgin – which turned out to be a 4 hour drive plus an extra 2 hours of getting lost. Just my typical “no sense of direction” at its best. I did go down alot of long, dark, country roads, which I’d felt like being part of a Silent Hill game, but with lovely Scottish countryside scenery. But I’d managed to arrive at the Moray College in one piece. So arrived at the jam and meet my fellow team mates, who were complete strangers to me. What’s great about game jams is getting the chance to work with other talented people and being able to learn from them, and possibly making new connections.
So the theme of this game jam is “It changed the world!”. For any game jam newbies reading this, the main idea behind a game jam is that you have to develop a video game within 48 hours for a grand prize. This jam has been put together by Screen HI, Hunted Cow Studios and Moray College. The main prize for the winning team will be offered to have their game further developed and published at the Hunted Cow Studios with the team’s assistance. This is an amazing prize which someone like me would love to win. The games would be judged and mentored by Andrew Mulholland (co-founder and HoofMaster at Hunted Cow), Brian Baglow (founder of the Scottish Games Network), Dave Cook (award-winning journalist, deputy editor of VG247) and Phil Harris (experienced writer, editor and designer) . Pictured below in order:
We would be competing against 40 competitors that has been split over 9 teams. For our game, we thought that music changes the world. So Audiosurf inspired, we wanted to create a game using Unity that would upload music that would change the level. We want to also put in a multiplayer feature with two gravities. Maybe also a chance to build combos to rack up the points. Sounded simple, but our worries were – could we do this in 48 hours? Especially since one of our programmers never turned up and I am only a novice who was very tired after a long drive. But we started to buckle down and start on our project. This is my team and I pictured below.
Saturday 15th March 2014:
After a few hours sleep, today was our main day of getting most of the work done. We managed to get the basic game mechanics, some of the artwork done and our sound guy to search for appropriate sound effects and music to use. Our next difficulty was splitting down a music track into waves and then using these waves to manipulate the platforms. With some problem solving and Google searching some tutorials, we managed to figure it out. Next task was to implement gameplay – how does the player get a score and how will we implement a multiplayer. The problem we had with multiplayer was to decide how to split the screen. Our idea was to have the platforms within the centre of the screen, which meant having the player one jump one way and player two, to jump the other way. Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as inverting the gravity.
So at this point of the day I’d decided to take a break and have a look at the competition, while munching on some free pizza. Courtesy of Scottish Games Network, I was able to get the low-down of my competition.
Team Name: Awesome Sauce Games
Team Members: Chris Day, Finlay MacDonald, Christopher Knox, Chris Thomas, Richard Logan-Bake
Game: Reality Shift – A reality altering puzzle platformer. Players have to alter reality by shifting between different areas of the game world.
Team Name: Powerpunch Studios
Team Members: Mark Thompson, Elliot Morris, Tasha Singh, Stuart Tait, Carl Paker
Game: Vaccine – a 2 player real time arcade type game. On a hex based grid, the players must seize control of the high scoring nodes.
Team Name: Jagged Kings
Team Members: Calum Petrie, Kevin McDowell, Gavin Crawford, James Smith
Game: Alexander – A tactical, pharmaceutical, logistical, educational and comic exploration of the life and scientific discoveries of Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin.
Team Name: Labracadabrador
Team Members: Daniel Waine, John Gifford, Richard Edwards, Carrie Francis, Ross Stephens
Game: They Changed Eden – Players must protect a planet a stream of asteroids, which will change the planet’s climate in some way, giving the inhabitants time to complete work on a giant space ark and escape the doomsday comet which is one its way.
Team Name: Dyno Games
Team Members: George Owen, Dino Mijatovic, Martin MacLeod, Dillan Mann, Craig Macdonald
Game: Dynopocalypse – Running around a rotating world, use incoming asteroids to destroy the dinosaurs!
Team Name: Pure Gaming
Team Members: Erin Stevenson, Vince Finlayson, Stefan Harrison, Duncan Gillespie
Game: Revelations – A node-based real time strategy game. Start and tailor your own religion and then send your believers out to cities across a procedurally generated continent to convert the godless heathen.
Team Name: Ramensoft
Team Members: James Wood, Alberto Taiuti, Lukasz Gomula, Natalia Sionek, Sam Cumming
Game: MicroPulse – A 2D side-on, steam punk shooter of sorts. Battle the most infamous viruses in the world. Deliver your precision-based medication and cure mankind
And last but not least, with no photo of team unfortunately….
Team Name: Stikkz Media
Team Members: Andrew French, Kierran Moors
Game: It Changed The World – A collection of mini-games, based upon the people, inventions and events which truly changed the world
Sunday 16th March 2014
So its the last day and our worse fears happened. We hit a major bug just hours before deadline. Sleep deprived, coffee filled and frantic, we rushed and even brought in the big guns of our mentors to help us. Then we realise that platforms would only move the way we want to certain songs. So we had to make up a new playlist of songs that the platforms would behave appropriately. Although despite the time running out we still remain optimistic that our game is good and we had an interesting take on the theme. But all the other games did look amazing, so I believe that we all were winners – not to sound cheesy. But we finally decided on a name within the last half an hour before judging – Tune Bounce.
So the time is 1pm and it was time up. Now we had ti impress 4 judges with 4 separate demonstrations of our game. We also encourage other team members to play our game and vice versa. Seeing other people’s finished games was great – being able to see the nearly finished concept and able to play it. I personally thought everyone’s games were amazing. It always astonishes me of what people can do in 48 hours. So, it 3pm and the winners were announced.
Congratulations to the winners who were:
1st Runner-up was Labracadabrador – They Changed Eden
“This concept sounded amazing from the very beginning. The very early prototype looked wonderful. Your job is to protect a planet from a barrage of incoming meteors using a handily positioned satellite. Spin the satellite around the planet and stop the terrifying space rocks. Each meteor, or possibly asteroid (it was never properly established which they were) affects the planet upon impact, raising or lowering the temperature, bringing new bacteria and biological diversity or raising the land mass. This in turn affects the life forms on the planet. You have to let the beneficial space rocks through, stop the bad ones and give the planet’s inhabitants time to construct a giant rocket an escape the huge mother of all asteroids, which is on a collision course
This was a great prototype and one which made all of the judges go ‘Ooooh!’. It was created on PC, but the team also managed to port it to Android tablet and mobile over the course of the jam. During the final discussion, the judges felt that the game had grown a little too complex and that the initial, simple concept had been a little buried under additional features. It’s still a damn fine game and one which deserves to see the light of day at some point very soon.”
2nd Runner-up was Dyno Games –Dynopocalypse
“This concept sounded eerily familiar from the very beginning. Your job is to use gigantic flaming meteors of death, to rain destruction down upon the poor unsuspecting dinosaur inhabitants of various planets, wiping them from the surface and leaving the world pure, pristine and presumably ripe for takeover by the jumped up monkeys. Designed for touch screens, the player must swipe from the edge of the screen to launch and guide their meteor of doom to impact. But the dinosaurs are quite nippy and run away from the hurtling space boulders. Plus many planets have moons zipping around them in close orbit, causing problems for the would be Vogon destructor. Limited meteors are on offer, so every one must count towards obliterating the scampering scaly swine on the early evolving earth.
This game was pretty much completed by the end of the first 24 hours and the team, cleverly spent the rest of the time play testing, polishing and building levels. It’s simple, intuitive and fun. There’s just enough gravity in the game to allow players to put a little spin on their burning fragments of cosmic matter and angle them in to take the lumbering behemoths by surprise. It was simple, fun and intuitive. One of the most popular games in the jam and showed the value of a simple concept, cleverly executed.”
The overall winner was Powerpunch Studios – Vaccine
What the Judges said:
“The Powerpunch team had a completed game, that was more or less ready for commercial release by the end of the jam. It was very simple to pick up and play, but offered a real challenge when competing against another player. The art style was simple and very effective and it was.. well, fun”
The game involves two players in this node-based strategy game. One player plays as a virus, while the other plays as a vaccine. The game level is on a hexagonal grid and the players have to move between each node to capture them. The node will then turn into the player’s colour and will start sending pulses across the grid. If the pulse comes in contact with an adjoining node the the player earns points. At the end of the 60 seconds, the player with the most points, wins the round.
So it’s sad that our team didn’t win, but it hasn’t put me off awaiting my next game jam. This would’ve been my third one this year and if you are a budding game maker then I suggest you should attend one if you haven’t done so yet. Even if you are a complete novice like me, you should go for the experience and be able to make new connections. I hope I have inspired you to do so. So for your pleasure, here is a gameplay video of the single player mode of our game – enjoy!
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