Sunday, March 16, 2014

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

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