Leading a video game community

I play Natural Selection 2 competitively, (clan: T.A.W ns2) but recently our Team leader had to quit, and that leaves me as the new Team leader.
If you want to see what NS2 looks like, I actually stream a lot of our sessions from my first person view on Twitch:

http://www.twitch.tv/skyfishart/c/6806618.


A typical match sees one person "commanding" the team from an overview point, who can think about the game strategy and place tactical structures.
The rest of the team play on the field in First Person Shooter mode as aliens or marine side. Despite being team lead, I play on the field, as these roles are not connected. I don't have as good a grasp of tactics as someone who is trained in commanding in game.

What I do have to do though, is train, organize, monitor, and keep motivated a small team. I don't feel like I have the time for it much, but I manage. So far I found it surprisingly inspiring, When our clan (group) leader (of 60 people) told me that he moved into leadership because he enjoyed it, I didn't understand why he would enjoy more work, but now I think I start to see it. The camaraderie is much stronger when you have to be the glue of the group and the one to deal with all the problems.

Below: Doodles of "Lerk" the alien lifeform I play as.

Official Lerk picture from Unkown Worlds:

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