Consiiquences?

Imagine Cup 2012 - End of Round 2
The second round for the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition ended 1 week ago. It was a very stressing deadline, causing pressure and tension in our team, especially during the last night of constant work. Despite other commitments, the team managed to complete the game up to the desired level for this stage, and I personally am fond of the direction the game is taking.

In around a week, we will be notified on whether we passed round 2, with our game Green Time. In the meantime, you can watch our game video in which we describe the game and show some game play footage.

You can also have a laugh at our "behind the scenes" in making this video. We were all very exhausted, and at least speaking for myself, I was very stressed in the video (quite visible probably). I also just couldn't pronounce 'consequences' correctly, which explains my impatience later on.

Everyday I'm Shufflin'

Round 2 for the Imagine Cup competition is very near, and our team is stepping up the effort and development. Below is a screenshot of the progress so game so far:

Figure 1 - Green Time Prototype (08.03.2012)

The graphics are looking delicious and gameplay is starting to take shape.

Oh, and if you are wondering about the title, just take a look at this:

Green Connect Steampunk Circus

The title is a mash-up of the project titles I'm currently working on. This semester is a busy one, but with lots of excitement, creativity and productivity. I was meant to write more on our Nordic Game Jam game, but I'll probably skip that. Instead, I go through quick look at my current projects:

Green Time - Microsoft Imagine Cup Game Challenge

Figure 1 - Early prototype of "Green Time"

Yes, the screenshot does not show much. This is an entry to the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition  by our team, AVANTgarde, with very harsh deadlines, so it falls under top priority currently.

Round 1 of the competition had ended on the 14th of February, where game ideas were reviewed, and around 350 from 500 entries were selected. The end of round 2 - the 13th of March - approaches quickly. 

This game, called Green Time, is an environmental awareness and persuasive game, and in a fun way attempts to increase consciousness of global warming and improve attitudes of people. 

The game revolves around you having the unique power to reverse the clock, explore causes of environmental issues and alter the course of time to improve the present world. The player notices some irregularities however, which eventually become clearer with a surprising ending.

Connect 4 - Can you beat me?

Figure 2 - Connect 4

This other smaller project, together with another team mate, involves creating a computer-controlled player for the Connect 4 game.

Simply exploring all possibilities in the game is a huge problem, that could take weeks, months or even years. Therefore we are challenged to create an artificial intelligence that is reasonably challenging.

I was surprised to realize that the 7x6 game was solved back in 1988, by James D. Allen (http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/c4/c4.html) (such that starting player can theoretically force a win). The referenced website provides some interesting statistics too, such as that such a sized game board contains 4531985219092 possible positions.

When this is finalized, I dare you to challenge the AI.

Welcome into a Steampunk Circus

You are welcome into the circus, but meanwhile, our wooden friend Marcel is courageously looking to free his companions and avoiding the seek revenge against the abusive puppet master. This is a project with a team of 8, consisting of a 3D game built in Unity.

You play Marcel, a wooden puppet; and without any direct combat in the game, you need to combine wit and timing to make the most out of the environment and overcome the challenges. 

More on this later on.

Nordic Game Jam #9 - We Fucked Up

So after revealing to us an entirely new, experimental, online way of voting for the winner of the finalist entries, they fucked up. The online system failed miserably, with lots of unpredicted behavior such as random votes going to unchosen entries.

Following a wasted waiting time, we went back to the so called traditional voting, where each person is given one lego piece (of course, in Denmark) to use it as a single vote

Voting the "traditional" way

The winners are being announced right now.

First place in the board games section is the astounding Mussades, that of magic carpets and robberies. It's truly an honor to win this prize, which gets their game sponsored and published professionally. Kudos to its designers.

The event progressed with the different juries expressing their personal favorite games and giving general feedback on the competition.

Finally, the grand prize of the Nordic Game Jam competition goes to, against my expectations, the "game" "Simon Gustafsson Two And A Fjers Men [Haha]". This is a very weird and freaky game, if it can be called a game after all, and perhaps it's this immense originality of the game that awarded the team the prize.

Winners of the Nordic Game Jam Competition 2012

Now, despite heavy lack of sleep and high consumption of caffeine, we go to party...because we only live once.

Nordic Game Jam #8 - Finals

It's been a very long and exhausting day after a sleepless night, with barely any time or strength to blog on the ongoing Nordic Game Jam. The experience to develop the game within 48 hours is simply amazing, especially when using unfamiliar tools and requiring an extremely quick learning effort.

Once again, I will write more about my team's game later on. Currently I am sitting through the finalists, in which sadly we did not qualify. Nevertheless, it is really an outstanding feeling to see crazy ideas and out-of-the-box innovation.

Some games that have struck me:

• A game for iPad between 2 participants. Taking turns, one has to imitate one or more sounds heard through an earphone. The other player must choose one of several pictures on the screen which represents the sound. The mapping is not immediately clear between sounds and pictures, but a pattern soon becomes recognizable.
• Another very simple yet hilarious open-for-everyone game. There are 4 colors on screen, and one or more people belong to each color. When the color lights up, the people in the team must shout as loud as they can to race ahead. 

Other games were particularly noteworthy, but might be a little harder to explain in words. I should have, in fact, recorded a video of the action, but my energy is running very low.

At this moment, I'm watching another finalist entry game that involves flying carpets and robberies.

Nordic Game Jam #7 - Work, work, work

Much work has been done today, and more still needs to be done until tomorrow. The game is progressing well, but many different parts of the game needs to be assembled and concretized.

A prototype to test sample 3D level and overlay map - right player watching left player from a top-down map

More on the game will be revealed later on.

A prototype to test gameplay

Unfortunately there are no more food waiting for us, except for the brunch tomorrow but that's a long time from now.

Edit: Great news! Just got to know there's a midnight snack awaiting.

Nordic Game Jam #6 - Dawn

The second day has started after a few hours of sleep. The serious coding begins today, possibly with no more sleep until the end of the competition.

All I can say currently is that the game involves cooperative play between 2 players, and probably a mix of suspense and humor. The first very simplified prototype was produced yesterday, with 2 players playing in the same game:

2 players connected to the game

Nordic Game Jam #5 - Kick-off

The talks have finished and then we invested significant time into creating groups for the competition. This involved coming up with different game ideas, one of which was even about playing Chris Crocker and shouting "Leave Britney Alone" to defend her from uncontrollable fans.

Then our group was formed, called "8 Hours", justified by Manveer's claim on how many hours to spend for a team name. We have an interesting and challenging idea, with a team of outgoing designers, artists and programmers.

Us code monkeys will be using Unity, a game engine whose professional license we have for the duration of the game jam. It is curious to see how many of our ambitions we will manage to materialize.

Nordic Game Jame #4 - "BioWare"

Last talk for today, but not least, by Manveer Heir, a senior designer from BioWare (currently working on Mass Effect 3) coming from Montreal.

Manveer around Copenhagen

Talk by Manveer, designer of Wolfenstein and Mass Effect 3

He leads a very lively and hilarious talk on the history of game jams, encouraging the spirit of creativity, fun and especially the leap to try new, crazy things that could generate a new, successful game idea or concept.

Manveer proceeds to talk about Rapid Prototyping, comparing it to pottery. He mentions an interesting observation in which a group of students are graded on the quality of a single pot they make, while another group of students are graded on the quantity of pots they manage to make. The result was that the quality for the group that produced masses of pots was higher - learning from mistakes and improving by doing.

On ideas, he talks that constraints are necessary. It's impossible to just imagine and think about anything, too many ideas will come.

"We're all full of stupid ideas".

Sharing stupid ideas can spark creativity and lead to good developed ideas.

"Better have something small and good, rather than broad and average".

The talk ended with great cheering and clapping. The actual jamming starts soon after this.

Nordic Game Jam #3 - "Sensible Soccer"

Currently sitting through a talk on "IP Licensing, Management and Royalties", but that's not as interesting as the person giving the talk is: Jon Hare.

Jon Hare

The name was not known to me, but he had worked with the "Sensible Software" company that was certainly known, especially in my childhood when remembering some popular games they made.

Back in the Amiga times, do any of you remember the games "Sensible Soccer", "Sensible World of Soccer" and the war game "Cannon Fodder"? Jon Hare was the co-director and artist of those games.

Sensible Soccer 

Cannon Fodder

Have you played any of these games during their time?

Nordic Game Jam #2 - "Ordnungswissenschaft"

The second talk in the Indie track involved the game Rochard: The Birth of an Astronomer. The game is quite innovative and fun from the trailers and gameplay videos we saw, but what was more interesting was the talk on its actual development.

Apparently there was barely a plan at all on the game to develop, and there was no designing and preparations before starting to actually create some artifact. By simply playing around with the popular Unity game engine, they grew with ideas, even too many ideas that some were abandoned.

All in all: Pre-production, planning and design are important, but success is possible without too. It can also be beneficial to disobey your producer.

Rochard

The third talk of the day was about artists who combined their very different skills into making creative games. This just shows the potential of synergies gained through teams of people from different backgrounds. Inspiration of games does not come simply through learning game design, but rather comes from anything but games (Alright, not entirely true. You do get inspired by other games to some extent).

Ordnungswissenschaft - game created by the artists

Nordic Game Jam #1 - "Shit Game"

So it's a good time to open up a game blog now, as I can start on the Nordic Game Jam competition in Copenhagen - a 3 day event with some talks and some game jamming (designing and developing a game within a very limited time frame).

I have recently checked in to the Game Jam in the IT University of Copenhagen and it was quite a hectic start. The initial talk was interestingly on low-budget games and how to make the most of simplicity. Games of this kind were mentioned, such as the "Shit Game" and "Space Funeral". Look them up.

shit game

space funeral

 And yes, the screenshot below is a screenshot of an actual game too:

lost in the static

Finally, there was another interestingly hilarious game and a video will be uploaded later on for your amusement, so keep in touch. There will be several updates of this blog during the jam.