Post Game Jam Update

Progress update on Global Game Jam Oslo

GGJ went off to great start for us at Oslo, we all gathered in the auditorium, where two talks were presented by Sam Partridge of Failbetter Games and Tom Kail of Inkle Studios. Of course the keynote was also shown.

New this year: we were all split into random practice teams in order to encourage people to form teams with strangers. The teams had a few minutes to come up with a game idea on the spot and then present it. I ended up on team 5. Thanks to this, something funny happened:
During the "find your teams" chaos, we all held up our hands with 5 fingers, resulting in us greeting each other with high fives. This then spawned the idea that we could make a a high five game. It then evolved into a body language and symbol game. We were a bit unclear on the rules, but it goes something like this:

A gesture based game

2 people stand back to back. One person is Leader, and the other is Follower. The leader makes a gesture with their arms. A third person, the interpreter, looks at the gesture and tries to communicate it in 2 words. The Follower then has to mimic the gesture based on those 2 words. If the Follower manages, they win a point and become leader. The next person in the queue then takes a spot as the new Leader. If the Follower doesn't manage, the follower goes to the back of the queue and the next person tries to be Follower.

Forming the new teams

After the team excercise, we were free to form teams any way we liked. I and Tzer0 had agreed to work together, but we had no concrete plans and ended up teaming up with the two speakers who stayed back in the auditorium. As time progressed throughout the event, more and more people migrated to our team, to a total of 7 members! That is the biggest team I have been on in a game jam.

Team composition:
Programming: Samuel Partridge (@SamuelPartridge), Tom Kail (@tomkail), Jan Anders Bremer (http://underhound.eu/), Eivind Hyldmo
Art: Christina Lewis (@SkyfishArt), Martin Joakim Ulstein (@Howlstone), Jonas Nordby,

The new game

Theme: Ritual
The game idea we attempted also came from the practice team session. It is based around a time loop where some cultists are trying to perform a ritual, and other characters are trying to stop it. Since there is a time loop, the player controls all of the character, one turn at the time. (or you can play multi player) The first round there is only one character on screen, the next round there will be two, but you only control the recent arrival. Different goals will be displayed on the screen, so if you play as the knight, you might want to kill a cultist. Or if you are the sheep, you may want to run away.
I don't know much about the coding but it sure looked like the programmers were busy, and we didn't quite finish it. It was playable before the deadline however, so I consider it a success.
Additionally, Tzer0 (Jan) made a fully functional audio system involving fading in and out of synchronized tracks, that would turn in and out from the menu, making  sure the audio was never interrupted. 
That means my goal of having "a game that does not sound annoying to someone not playing it" was halfway met. (the sound effects were still haphazard and the baby literally explodes)

Personally, I contributed to the art. I wanted the game to be set in space but I was overruled, so a lot of my work was made redundant. I wish I had understood sooner. Still, the tiling floor, altar slab, and background were made by me, as well as the blue cuthulu alien character. I had issues taking screencaps near the deadline so they are brutally blurry. I used "Sword & Sworcery" (game) as a style guide for the other artists to make the characters with.

Things I learned:

• Use images with pixel ratio dividable by 4 because something something programming something unity.
• How to pull, commit, and push art into game with git, using sourcetree. Will git again.
• How to open project in Unity. There is a first for everything.
• When something is bothering you, just say it. There is no time to be annoyed and the consequences are probably tinier than you think.
• Don't assume you understand what anyone meant. You never understand what anyone meant.

Global Game Jam Oslo

Global Game Jam is this weekend. 29.-31.January

Global Game Jam Oslo is being held at Westerdals.

I'm participating with my programmer buddy Tzer0 but we might have to look for more team members. We are gearing up for a potentially 3D VR experimental project this time, though I'm woefully under prepared with my mixed noob 3D abilities. I'd place my bets on a simpler game for the jam and the VR for later. See you there?

Ludum dare 33 post summary

It's that time again, Ludum dare 33, our favourite game jam, had been and gone.

The resulting game can be seen here: Pokemen - Ludum Dare 33

Indie game about Pokemen. From ancient Cornish, meaning: Stupid, clumsy.

The theme: "You are the monster". I took the familiar concept of Pokemon, everyone's favourite monster battling game, and replaced the monsters with "pokemen" instead. In my design, you control the monster directly, becoming a literal interpretation of the theme at first. However, as the battle progresses, you can see your trainer off to the side shouting commands and encouragement. After a while the trainers dialogue will become progressively more abusive. The worse you do the more abusive the trainer becomes. The pokemen battle to the death and we attempted to implement some gore. This way, it is actually the pokemen trainer who is the true monster, for abusing their slave pokemen. 

3 different pokemen to choose from

Charlog, Bulbabud and Squirtop.

The game plays a bit like a 2D fighter. tzer0 did all the programming and sound and definitely worked the hardest of us two. Next time I'd like to find one or two more people since the time really doesn't stretch that well in such a small game jam.

Ratings

#338	Audio(Jam)	3.23
#587	Graphics(Jam)	3.27
#625	Innovation(Jam)	2.88
#628	Theme(Jam)	3.31
#671	Humor(Jam)	2.54
#791	Overall(Jam)	2.92
#791	Fun(Jam)	2.69
#823	Mood(Jam)	2.71
#1314	Coolness	47%

I was hoping to beat my Ludum Dare rating from my last game "Escape from Animal forest" but we somehow did worse on all scores. This I find somewhat disappointing since I tried much more to work hard this time around. It just goes to show that effort does not always equal output. Many of the small decisions and shortcuts I had to take left this game looking less interesting than the last one. I'll list some reasons I suspect we had a worse result here for my own reference next time:

• fewer team members = a LOT more work per member
• less time available = crappier result
• Maybe avoid pixel art due to over-use in game jams. (hard to say if this was a cause or if my poor use pixels was, still, I love charlog)
• more animation frames = less time on overall art
• prioritise UI, menu and splash page better (didn't make these in time) These make up a lot of the game's "overall visuals" especially in screens that people judge us by.
• Figure out what went wrong with colour palette before theme announces
• make actual mock game before team announces to test for unforeseen consequences:
  -tzer0 didn't have "playable-game-in-browser"
  experience and lost a lot of time because of my unexpected demand for it.
  -Figure out what went wrong with colour palette before theme announces
  -Figure out how the art style will look in an actual browser (size of game border vs scale of objects etc)
• add "fix user experience" as a responsibility on my timeslotting list to ensure the overall is ok.
  -many people had problems with getting the game to work including myself.
  Our commenters said the game wasn't "fun" yet this is the most complete game I have made in any gamejam, and it is the first where people complain about the lack of fun. I suspect that if you release an incomplete game, people get more lenient on the whole "no fun" but if you have a functioning game that is still not fun then it counts against you a lot more. I personally thought our "Escape the forest" attempt was very unfun and that pokemen was miles better, yet "Escape" had a much higher score. I suppose it is hard to tell with only two tries, perhaps simply better competition could explain the scores after all.

Below is my journal of this Ludum Dare proceeding for those interested:

I started early this time, one day ahead so I could test my setup. That was wise, as I had to update 7 programs (all adobe programs i use plus krita) plus one bug fix in krita. Besides I had to dust off my Krita - photoshop workflow. I rely on Krita for game making because of it's wrap around mode, mirror drawing, and generally the brush engine just feels easier to sketch with for some reason.

I drew my first pixelart in my testing. I MAY have been inspired to do so because I saw this cool artist just the day before: CELLUSIOUS his pixels are worth the watch. Pixels is really fun to work with because it frees me of my bad habit of getting lost in details.

Also played around with a screenshot of mario to see how it works and speculate about why it looks like it looks. I'm not fond of the style but I wanted to see what it could take to make Mario surreal. I like how I accidentally touched upon a potential answer to the theme that was chosen.

The theme this time around is "You are the monster"

Here is my 5 o'clock rambling list of ideas that I woke up to write (including spelling mistakes!):

Sheep or wolf u font know

• Game mechanicallt
• Morally
• Hurt self to hurt others
• Dentist,
• Kids perspektive
• Ea eat games
• Hold your ground by waiting.
• Bugs in software
• Mario clone but play as koppa
• Godzilla demolished.
• Ant, wasp, wolf fight for survival
• Anorexia, psychological monsters
• Enemies controller, parasite swap body.
• Pokemon re angled :
• Bulbabud, birdy, rodentish, charmangler, char ming, squirtoob, s
• Don't step over the line. He
• Stepped over the line.
• You are the dice in dnd campaign .

I think this theme is going to be fun, even if there will be a lot of obvious takes on "you are the monster" it will still be fun.

Once the game making actually began I rediscovered timeslotting. I had to complete 

• creature design (pencil drawing)

• creature render (pixel drawing)

• level design (pixel drawing)

• ui design

• animation (magnificent 2 frames per action!)

• moves (hopefully)

By dividing each task by the total time I had, I ended up with only about an hour or two for each task. ( I could not use the full LD time due to work)

Long story short, I had 7 minutes per frame of animation and I could only afford 2 frames per action (jump, attack, run etc). It may seem like a long time for just moving a few limbs, but I am not very experienced with animation OR pixel art so this felt like a very short time when I was actually doing it. Photoshop tricks like "transform" does not work with pixel art. pixels don't rotate (unless it's 90 degrees i guess). Some frames took less and some took more. 

All in all the project was as tiresome yet educational as gamejams always are for me and I will take my experience forward.

Suddenly Gamejam Season

Last weekend was Sonen game jam. Next week (17th april 2015) is Ludum Dare, I haven't organized anything, but I'm still considering it last minute. 
For sonen, this time I participated much more casually with an intent to get an excuse to learn using Krita with only my laptop (built in drawing technology) I have been avoiding it because of a whole host of problems, inconveniences and simply being out of my comfort zone. Dragging out the trusty and superior wacom tablet was always too tempting, so for the gamejam I elected not to bring it. Of course, this resulted in no game entry this time. Though I did make a few sketches on the last day where I caved and brought the wacom tablet.... (sigh, but I don't regret it!)

All in all it was successful:

• Krita doesn't seem to crash anymore (why? I don't know.)
• Ntrig now has pressure sensitivity in krita (driver update+krita update+nvidia update)
• Contributed bug reports to krita community
• Met some cool old and new people
• Rediscovered my favourite photoshop brush
• Laptop can be used for drawing in a pinch or with external keyboard

The problem with the vaio flip is that both krita and photoshop are cumbersome without hotkeys, and the vaio hides the keyboard under the screen in tablet mode. Perhaps with a third, simpler drawing app I could enjoy lap-drawing better, might try microsoft paint again, it does have the undo button in plain sight unlike the others.

1-4  reverse process on a "pokefusion" sandslash and machop

5 pokefusion beedrill and ghastly drawn with only my favourite photoshop brush (chalk with low flow)

6 abstract brush practice

The above image is the result of my doodling. I use a little photoshop plugin called "layersToSprite" to automatically output layers into one image, but lately I can't control how many rows it adds due to a weird problem I can only fix with a fresh windows install. (do not want) I also realize they are in the reverse order so that is something to keep in mind next time.

Game Jam: Ludum Dare 30 results

Ludum Dare 30, the weekend game jam, is now past. I held a local instance of it at Bitraf again.
The theme was "Connected worlds" and you can read my write up of it at this link.  (Ludum Dare 30, Escape from Animal Forest progress)

You can play the game on the link below.
Escape From Animal Forest

Looking at our scores, I'm happy to see we placed 83rd in mood, it makes me confident in thinking that next time, if I push just a little harder on the graphics, we could probably make something that really stands out. Seeing as we were a bit stumped for ideas for this event's theme, I spent a lot of time on the game design instead of the visuals.

Ratings

#83	Mood(Jam)	3.80
#156	Graphics(Jam)	3.97
#177	Innovation(Jam)	3.45
#204	Theme(Jam)	3.55
#229	Audio(Jam)	3.39
#268	Overall(Jam)	3.39
#384	Fun(Jam)	3.03
#487	Humor(Jam)	2.13
#1204	Coolness	49%

Ludum Dare 29 day 2

(Click here for day 1)

Day 2 of ludum dare 29 is now over, and we (Christina Lewis, Benjamin Benjaminsen, Tormod Berge and now Martin Kvale) have made a functioning game! It's not quite polished, but it has mechanics and art, and we are pretty happy about that. Download is here: Fishy Business, ludum dare 29

We all collectively forgot about the good ideas we had for names, and a decision had to be made, I attempted to make some sort of pun involving deep/ depression / fishing for compliments, but it was not to be. Growing impatient and the day ending, I went home and my dear coworkers went for the opportunity and named it "Fishy Business"

Benjamin finished the game's programming, and we were extremely lucky to have Martin Kvale of Krillbite Studio making some music for us! (They made Among the sleep you know)

I would like to say that our game was super deep and well thought trough, but in the end we had more of a "something something emotions as physical landscape" "something something metaphor" as a general direction. In the end, we had fun, we (probably) learned things, and I enjoyed working together with everyone.

(I will see about making some sort of video showcasing the game, I will have to figure out how first, in the mean time, you can download it up top.)

Skyfish out! 

Ludum Dare 29

I am participating in Ludum Dare 29! 
(As of writing, that is today and tomorrow)

This time's theme is "below the surface". My game jam sort of began a day in advance, spending the evening troubleshooting various problems with my laptop. In the end I got some help to get twitch streaming working, (but of course I forgot all about streaming when the game jam really came) At 8:00 this morning I promptly awoke on my own, checked the theme, and dreamily wrote down some obscure and confusing words into my smartphone before falling asleep for another hour:

Insects topsoil
Fungus network
Educatinal game about cells, clorofyll
Underwatet drama
My fish jump game
Something largr and looming on hook.
A persons emotions
A persons thoughts
A game about erradocating depressive thoughts from The mind, black sketchystuff, use erasing motion and gun play to kill sketchystuff.
A game about learning to swim
Drowning in everyday life; 2D sink or swim in city landscape with business men floating up and elaborate creatures eating people floating while normal life resumes below.
Man hiding in bath refill foam and water to not be embarrassed
-surface of a problem

Some hours later I arrived at Local Oslo hackerspace: Bitraf and met two strangers who had agreed to make games with me the evening prior. These people consisted of Benjamin Benjaminsen and Tormod Berge We presented our thoughts/ideas/associations, and like last time, my ideas struck fancy with my new friends and the idea we picked were the following:

"Drowning in everyday life; 2D sink or swim in city landscape with business men floating up and elaborate creatures eating people floating while normal life resumes below."

The current state of my work on this game can be seen below, I am trying to create an underwater-sort-of scene with skyscrapers, people and fish, but the buildings and fish will be provided by the 3D guy while I work on the overall mood and make sure the end result doesn't look like we threw a bunch of very different assets together. Trying to capture the pallette I had in mind is being annoyingly difficult, I wand a grim, miserable, depth, deep feeling, but without the planned paralax effect the depth doesn't really kick in like I imagine, having to rely on colours alone.

In afterthrought I'm not sure if it really makes sense anymore. It's quite literally "below the surface" and I imagine many other Ludum Dare entries will be set underwater, but I really like the idea of these business people stuck in the rat race feeling "below" in this metaphor of emotion as a strange underwater landscape with ominous fish in it. We/I are primarily operating on instinct with the metaphorical part, playing around with whether or not the people should float up, sink down, escape, be saved, be eaten, avoid the fish, get eaten by the fish, or if the fish are background elements.

Check in tomorrow to see how far we get, we have only scheduled these two days to work on it ;)

Sonen Game jam spring 2014

Sonen game jam just passed, a 48 hours frenzy of independent video game making. I entered as a participant, and joined up with two strangers to create a video game from scratch.

Team name: Pocket Fluff Entertainment
Game name: Space Whales
Game jam theme: Coupled

Play the game here
(two player game, WASD/arrows to move, 1 to eccholocate to navigate the maze. You win when whales are united) Sometimes it gets buggy and spawns you in an unreachable location. Just try again :p

See the other entries here.

Day one, we played around with a couple of ideas, we had several but eventually chose the most "game-like" of the one. The theme was "coupled" and we interpreted that as two space farers being connected with an oxygen supply. I didn't want to do space marines in space, so we compromised and made whales in space instead and went for a slightly comedic game instead of a serious one.

Day two, I suffered severe technical problems when Photoshop and Krita would not respond correctly, photoshop hogging my CPU to the point of the pc struggling and lagging too much to draw, and pen pressure missing from both programs. This was resolved thankfully by mid day, with 3 windows updates and a re-install of my tablet driver.

Day three, we finished up the music, art and programming. It got a bit hectic for my team mates who had their individual problems; the musician had problems with the software to loop seamlessly, and the programmer had a lot of things to do and some bugs kept appearing. 

Although we didn't win, it was a great learning experience. I discovered amongst other things, that Krita has a tiling function that I have been wishing existed for a long time. 

Image from Krita.org

See more about that at Krita.org, all you have to do is press W in krita and it activates this drawing mode. Krita is free remember so anyone can try it :3

Game development tuesday

I made a flyer for Bitraf, Oslo's coolest hackerspace! What is a hacker space you ask? bitraf.no It's like a club where we do anything and everything related to video games, electronics, technology, art and whatever other cool stuff we want to do. It has nothing to do with "hacking" like it is portrayed in mainstream media, the term "hacking" refer to "hacking things together", as in DIY, though the sound of rapid clicking on keyboards is often heard in our offices. :P

The design of this flyer was inspired by the missigno glitch from the pokemon games, I used it's colours as a base and a glitchy theme.

Ludum Dare game jam result

I participated in the ludum dare game jam with the hacker space Bitraf in oslo. We didn't manage to get the game working in time, but here are the assets I drew for it. The game jam only lasted 2 days.

The game was supposed to be about the life of a horse-fly, (the green eyed bug) They slice open human skin to lick their blood, so the arm is the "boss" if you like. Dragonflies are casual enemies to be avoided.

The game was supposed to have a funny control mechanism where you control the wings independently, thus making it hard and funny to steer. I still like this concept, so I may work further on it in the future sometime.