Monthly Archives: January 2010

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

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?

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

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!

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!