GGJ 2010: Sprinkle
The title screen (and first level) of Sprinkle
Jason wasn’t the only Fire Hoser to participate in the Global Game Jam last weekend. I was also in the trenches slapping a game together, only I was on the other side of the river at the Northeastern University site.
The result is Sprinkle, a neat little puzzle game based on the idea of raindrops falling through a tree. The goal in each level is to move objects around to guide the falling water droplets to a flower. Once the flower has fully bloomed you’re taken to the next level. Go ahead and give it a shot — it only takes a few minutes to play through.
Looking at the game again after letting a week go by, I’m impressed with how fully developed the game seems for a two-day effort. It contains a coherent core mechanic, some interesting variations, and a fair number of well-thought-out (if simple) levels. This is all the more impressive considering that, in true game jam fashion, the first playable level came together at roughly 1:00 Sunday afternoon, only two hours before the deadline!
I was working on music and sound design for this game. The other team members were three programmers — Shakeib Afzal, Kirk Israel, and Heinz Pabst — and Zachary Fand, who created the nicely idyllic visuals.
Early on, I decided to try to put a bit of musical interactivity into the game, similar to that in a game like Elektroplankton. Specifically, the music I had in mind would go back and forth between two chords, and the sound effects would be designed to fit into these chords, so that the sound effect that any particular object makes would change depending on what part of the music loop is currently playing. The results are mixed; sometimes it comes off as intended, but in most levels the experience is a little awkward — either there are too few objects for anything interesting to happen, or there is a flood of objects creating an annoying and broken-sounding cacophony. Partly this is inevitable in a game jam, when exactly what the game is going to feel like is not necessarily determined until close to the end. But there were also some good takeaways for me.
First, as part of the sound design process, it pays to think carefully about what kinds of events will be triggering sounds, how often they will occur, and how likely each event is to repeat. If I were to revisit the sound design after seeing all of the levels that made it in, I would definitely reconsider the scheme for assigning sound effects to collisions, trying things like having collisions turn on or off a loop, or having each object emit a sequence of notes as it is hit multiple times rather than repeating a single note. Second, it’s important to pay attention to the technical details early on — can we get the music to loop smoothly? How are we going to handle repeating the same sound a dozen times in close succession? I’m happy with the overall sound of the game, but I would be much happier still if we had sorted this stuff out early! Having the technical aspects be a little bit off makes the whole experience much less polished and enjoyable.
I had a really fun time putting the game together with the team and was impressed by the level of energy, enthusiasm and creativity from everyone at the jam. If you’ve never tried doing a game jam before I highly recommend it!
February 8, 2010 | | Comments (0)
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What We’re Playing: RunRunRunJump
The Global Game Jam was last weekend, and a lot of amazing games were made (for a recount of how one went down check out Jason’s awesome dev blog). A full run down of the more interesting Boston offerings is coming soon, don’t worry!
The current front runner for our favorite GGJ game? That would have to be RunRunRunJump, a delightful and short game by Owen Macindoe, Scott Macmillan, Daniel Perry, Alex Schwartz, and Stephie Wu. The game is a simple platformer, but what is interesting is that the environment literally tells you what to do – if the ground says run, then run! If it says jump, then jump! The soundtrack is especially amazing as it is self referential as well – listen for a few seconds and you’ll know what I mean.
Of course, the theme of the game jam was deception so you should expect a couple of twists to be thrown at you as the game goes on. Keep playing though – the victory screen at the end of the game makes it all worthwhile.
One important thing to note is that the game requires the Unity web player to work, download it here. And then go play RunRunRunJump!
February 3, 2010 | | Comments (0)
Category: Games, What We're Playing
Tags: game jam, global, jump, run, runrunrunjump, unity
GGJ 2010: Post Mortem-ing a Weekend
The Last Bullfight: Our beauty render
Global Game Jam 2010 Post #3:
The weekend is over and our game is playable (!).
You can find it here: http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/last-bullfight.
We recommend the web/flash version (may ask you to download/install the small Unity/flash player).
If you are stuck in any way, please email me: Jason@FireHoseGames.com
What Went Awesome:
* Treating Each Other Well: listening to each other’s ideas, encouraging each other to take water and brain breaks, keeping good humor, appreciating each other’s contributions.
* Making Good Decisions as a team at regular intervals on what features to keep and what to toss in order to get the project done: late Saturday afternoon, late Saturday night and first thing Sunday morning.
* Planning Our Work Flow: in our design doc we structured the weekend into 3-hour block “sprints.” This helped to guide our productivity and made a good balance between being able to dive deeply into our work and regularly checking-in with each other. We also got each other’s contact info right at the start, chose a safe source system, and established an “it is OK to recuse yourself early from meetings in order to be productive” policy.
* Allowing Pablo Picasso to do all our concept art for us.
* Research: we spent two hours on Friday night watching and discussing bullfights on Youtube, and came away with a clear vision for our subject matter that supported our thinking all weekend.
* Manageable Art Scope: making a game with only one location and where the main animated characters–the bull and the matador–are frequently invisible made it much easier as the sole artist to produce any kind of quality rather than just quantity.
* Our wacky deception mechanic, to our surprise and delight, actually seems to make sense to people.
What Could Have Went Awesomer:
* The free version of Unity did not play nice with our choice of version safe software, SVN, and by my estimate our (amazing) two-person code team lost 20% of the weekend dealing with issues around synching their work until downloading a professional trial late Saturday night.
* Possibly a better balance between tweaking and implementing features: considering we had so little time to get our game made before the 3pm Sunday deadline, I wonder if we could have spent less time tweaking details of the game on Saturday and more time getting features in as quick and dirty as possible. As team artist, I was aware of how motivating it was for my team to see semi-polished art early on, but also that having rougher animations available earlier than the Saturday evening sprint would have helped the team to get gameplay feedback features in sooner, allowing us to test the game before the bleeding deadline edge.
* Defining/addressing Work Needs Better: we allowed one of our teammates, the research/QA lead, to work essentially on his lap all weekend when we should have gotten him a table, and another needed more quiet space than we found for him early on. A better discussion of what each person needs to be productive should have been part of our first meeting.
* More documentation: it is hard to document everything when creating a game at 90 miles an hour, but the few times we did document our work made such a huge difference in our thinking and productivity that I suspect any bit more would have helped.
We want to thank Rik Eberhardt and Phillip Tan and everyone at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab for hosting this fantastic event and taking such good care of us all weekend, from the great organization to tech support to arranging meals. We recommend you try out all the games made at MIT this weekend. Some we are particularly fond of include:
* Run Run Run Jump: More joy than any single game should be capable of producing in one weekend. These guys shared a space with us, so yes, their sound track is permanently scarred into our brains: http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/runrunrunjump
* Press X to Not Die: Amazingly clever and deliciously mean game, a send-up of Quicktime events with an exceptional amount of beautiful 2D animation: http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/press-x-not-die
* Quest for Stick: Lovely Braid-like look and feel, with a very cool mechanic for interacting with the world: http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/quest-stick
February 1, 2010 | | Comments (0)
Category: Uncategorized
Tags: bull, bullfighting, game development story, Global Game Jam 2010, matador, singapore-mit gambit game lab, The Last Bullfight
GGJ 2010: The Most Heartbreaking Laughter
My Team, EL MATADORS: Cole, me, Mike, Nazer, and Matt. You can't tell, but we are each holding little Mariachi band figures that decorate our workspace this weekend.
Global Game Jam 2010 Post #2:
It is 12:30am again. Day two of the 2010 Global Game Jam is in the bag. I planned to post an update in the afternoon, but there was not a second to spare all day. We sprinted through 15 hours of development today, and found ourselves in all three of what I am told are the classic Day-Two moments: a serious talk in the afternoon about what features can be kept and what needs to be discarded for the sake of completing the project, a major technical crisis where the tools broke in the face of our ambition, and reaching a place where the most frustrating and incomprehensible bugs brought laughter instead of tears, where the relief of having gotten this far, and the pleasure in doing this together, won over whether or not the thing we want to call a game ever becomes what we hoped.
And we were not the only ones. I overheard other teams talking about what they could cut and heard heart-rending stories of programmers losing their entire work so far due to a computer error of some sort (even in a 3-day project–or especially in a 3-day project!– a version-safe system is critical). And slap-happy giggles filled the corridors between the MIT Gambit labs in the last hours, developers enjoying after a long day the many interesting ways their games managed to break.
So how is “The Last Bullfight” coming along, you ask? Thanks to the art direction of our good friend Pablo P, in-game art and animation are pretty much complete (at least, sufficiently to show all of the features we planned). The sound work is in good shape, including a powerful song composed by our designer. The code features that have been completed are successfully producing an atmosphere, a sense of perspective and place, and we are happy about that so far. While the back-end code of the basic kill-or-be-killed game play is in, there is no real feedback yet to the player on which is occurring, which we understand is the difference between having a game and having a weird little interactive movie. We hope to have a game tomorrow.
One day left. See you on the other side,
Jason
January 31, 2010 | | Comments (0)
Category: Development Blog, Events, Games
Tags: game development story, Global Game Jam 2010, Jason Wiener, MIT Gambit, The Last Bullfight
Global Game Jam 2010: Artist Jason Reports From The Front
Global Game Jam 2010 Post #1:
It’s Friday night, 12:30am. We have just been kicked out of MIT’s Gambit labs to get a few hours of sleep before a full day of development tomorrow. The last eight hours are a blur; meeting dozens of developers, hearing the theme and constraints of the 2010 jam (International theme: deception. Local theme: abstraction. Constraints to choose among: rain, plain, Spain), taking 90 minutes to discuss ideas, with proposals flying so fast and furious my head felt full ten minutes into it, pitching our ideas, forming teams, and then getting as much pre-production nailed before they sent us packing.
I pitched a game (and found a willing team) where you are a bull in a Spanish bullfight. The goal is to kill the matador before he kills you. Being in the bull’s perspective, the environment we are planning is distorted; black and white Pablo Picasso-style architecture and characters, where the matador is practically invisible unless you are a few feet from him, but his flowing red cape tantalizes you at every turn (yes, we know Bulls can’t actually see the color red. Game is more fun this way. We think.).
We started by making sure everyone had everyone else’s contact info, wrote up a design doc and rough asset list, discussed how we plan to communicate and treat each other, decided on tools and how we will handle version control, and looked up reference material. While beginning a VERY rough prototype, we watched about two hours of bullfighting video, and found ourselves, already in the mindset of the bull, booing the humans.
Can we get this done by Sunday? We have two programmers (one an industry pro, one currently at MIT) using the Unity engine, one sound designer from Berklee, a QA/research lead from Sloan, and me making the art. I have no idea where we will be on Sunday, but I am excited about the team.
More tomorrow,
Jason
Who would kill this cute little bull?
January 30, 2010 | | Comments (1)
Category: Uncategorized
Tags: game development story, Global Game Jam 2010, Singaore MIT Gambit Game Lab, The Last Bullfight
IGDA Rapid + Iterative Prototyping Slides Available!
By popular demand, here are the slides from my web based talk on Rapid Iterative Prototyping. Take a look why don’t you! If you’d like to present this to a class or to someone else feel free to do so, please just give me a credit somewhere.
If you have questions on the talk or one that didn’t get answered during the presentation please feel free to ask in the comments section and I’ll answer it there, alternatively you can just e-mail me. And if this is your first time here then welcome, and be sure to join our twitter/facebook/rss feeds!
Oh man, I’ve gotten soooo many good suggestions for awesome web comics from this talk 
January 27, 2010 | | Comments (10)
Category: Events, Words of Wisdom
Tags: comics, Eitan, Facebook, IGDA, iterative, lecture, presentation, prototyping, rapid, rss, slides, twitter
Inspector Gadget: Man or Machine?
We’ve been kicking this question around the office for a while and are unable to come up with a satisfactory answer. Is Inspector Gadget a man or a machine?
There is ample evidence that Gadget is some sort of Cyborg with extensive implants; that would certainly explain the fact that his limbs all seem to function in mechanical ways at times and “normally” at other times. It also explains his demeanor and human personality.
But at what point does one stop being a Cyborg and become a full fledged robot? Gadget regularly has things pop out of his head (see above image), implying that his skull is storage space and indicating that he may in fact be a robot. An alternate theory is that he is entirely human and has some sort of advanced nano-robotic implants which construct (and then deconstruct) his gadgets upon verbal “Go Go” commands.
The rabbit hole goes pretty deep on this one; if Gadget isn’t human, what is his relationship to Penny? Is she actually his niece, or perhaps some sort of highly trained and competent caretaker? Evidence in the cartoon show would certainly support this theory. And what about Brain? Does he have some sort of neuro-stimulation of his own going on? How else could we explain his extraordinary intelligence as a K-9?
What do you think? Let us know where you stand on this in the comments!
January 26, 2010 | | Comments (1)
Category: Random
Tags: 80s, Brain, Cartoon, Conspiracy, Cyborg, Gadget, go go, Human, Inspector, mystery, Penny, Random, robot, Theory, TV
Words of Wisdom: Boston Indies on Monday, IGDA Webinar on Wednesday
Eitan’s going to be giving two great talks next week – first, at Boston Indies on Monday, second as an IGDA Webinar on Wednesday.
Boston Indies – Monday, January 25 @ 7pm – The Asgard, Cambridge, MA
Join Eitan at Boston Indies on Monday as he shows off Slam Bolt Scrappers and discusses the development of the game thus far. It’ll be a pretty informal event, and it’s at a bar, so you get to drink some beer and hang out with the rest of Boston Indies. Find directions to the Asgard right here.
IGDA Webinar – Wednesday, January 27 @ 12pm – Dial In
After you’ve heard all about Slam Bolt Scrappers on Monday evening, tune in Wednesday afternoon to hear Eitan presenting an IGDA webinar on Rapid, Iterative Prototyping. Eitan will be explaining why it’s a great way to get started on a game if you’re missing other essential elements like an artist, funding, etc. Plus he’ll be showing off some of the builds we’ve developed using this method.
It’s going to be a busy week of talks, hope to see you at the events!
January 22, 2010 | | Comments (0)
Category: Words of Wisdom
Tags: asgard, Boston, IGDA, indies, iterative, prototying, rapid, Slam Bolt Scrappers
Review of 2K’s Borderlands
I’ve spent the better part of the past weekend playing through Borderlands, a new first person shooter with RPG elements from 2K. I had fun playing so here are my thoughts on the game.
What was interesting: I liked the Diablo similarities where you get procedurally generated loot for killing enemies. While it can be cumbersome at times to sort through all the drops it did certainly feel satisfying when you found the rapid-fire-rocket-launcher-of-lighting-your-enemy’s-face-on-fire. The tech tree part was fun too, I played as a Berserker and leveled up my ability to punch people to death instead of the tried and true shooting method. The missions that you picked up, while mostly formulaic, kept me engaged enough to want to keep playing to see what happened next. Finally, I really enjoyed the voice acting for a couple of the characters, especially the hillbilly who offers you vehicles (”Get you one!”)
What was ok: The vehicle sections were about as mediocre as I expected, and felt very reminiscent of Halo Warthog Jeep (alas, no flying motorcycle or tank). The plot was entirely throw away as far as I was concerned (I’m searching for some secret treasure vault? Who gives a shit?) but luckily the game didn’t really shove it down my throat too much. The game had a nice visual aesthetic with some cartoony/serious graphics, but after a while things started to blend together and I got tired of the whole junkyard look and feel. It’s too bad they didn’t explore different environments with different colors more! The boss fights were generally good, with some memorable tangles, but there were too few bosses to break up the game play.
What sucked: After a while things started to get a little bit repetitive, especially in the enemy department. By the end I was just playing for the sake of playing, not because I wanted to see the next exciting thing. Some of the fetch quests were kind of annoying too, especially when it clearly felt like a fetch quest.
What I missed: The multiplayer! Everyone tells me this is one of the best features of the game, but I only played through single player. After I find my gold trial I’ll give the co-op and death match modes a shot and see how they play out, I’m sure they’re a ton of fun.
Overall I think Borderlands was a lot of fun, and it appeals to me even though I’m not usually into FPS-es. I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot, especially if you like playing with friends. Accept its flaws and you’ll have a good time.
January 18, 2010 | | Comments (0)
Category: Games
Tags: 2K, Borderlands, Diablo, FPS, Halo, multiplayer, procedural, repetitive, rpg
Words of Wisdom: Mia Consalvo on Western Otaku Culture
Attention anime nerds: Ever want to hear a academic reconstruct your obsession with all things Japanese related? Well you’re in luck! In this talk Mia Consalvo, noted game academic and all around kick-ass individual, delves into why we love Japan when it comes to games. It’s a long talk but pretty interesting and definitely worth watching. Thanks to Gene and CMS for the recording.
Here’s the talk description:
From Nintendo’s first Famicom system, Japanese consoles and videogames have played a central role in the development and expansion of the digital game industry. Players globally have consumed and enjoyed Japanese games for many reasons, and in a variety of contexts. This study examines one particular subset of videogame players, for whom the consumption of Japanese videogames in particular is of great value, in addition to their related activities consuming anime and manga from Japan. Through in-depth interviews with such players, this study investigates how transnational fandom operates in the realm of videogame culture, and how a particular group of videogame players interprets their gameplay experience in terms of a global, if hybrid, industry.
Enjoy!