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“Get All The Ice Cream!” Jeff Ward and the Global Game Jam

kate — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:14:32 +0000

Did you ever wonder what would happen if the hit show ‘The Iron Chef‘ got rid of all of the gourmet nonsense and concentrated on video games instead?

Wonder no longer: Global Game Jam would happen.

Each year the IGDA (International Game Developers Association) puts the GGJ together, inviting professionals and hobbyists alike to hunker down and create a game in 48 hours. In case that wasn’t harrowing enough, there is a catch.

From the Global Game Jam site:

The structure of a jam is usually that everyone gathers on Friday afternoon, watches a short video keynote with advice from leading game developers, and then a secret theme is announced. All sites worldwide are then challenged to make games based on that same theme, with games to be completed by Sunday afternoon.

Emphasis my own, because secret themes are awesome and should be emphasized. What was year’s secret theme?

An Ouroboros: an ancient symbol representing a dragon or serpent eating its own tail.

And that’s’ it: 48 hours, serpent eating its own tail, good luck.

Who could rise to such an occasion? Jeff Ward for one!

Fire Hose had a couple of people participate in this year’s Global Game Jam this year, Ethan Fenn, whom we will feature in a later post, and Jeff Ward. Jeff’s team created a two player game with the apropos title Eat Sheep and Die.

Jeff on Jam:

This jam was way less stressful than any other jam I’ve participated in. We essentially had something fun to play by middle of day 2, and just polished things throughout the end of day 2 and day 3. As a result, this is probably the most complete jam game I’ve ever worked on. Very little went wrong. It was great.

You can read more about Jeff Ward’s experiences with the Global Game Jam on his blog.

BioShock Monopoly! Would you kindly collect $200 as you pass go?

kate — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:58:49 +0000

Hello Fire Hose friends.

Perhaps on Halloween you stumbled across an article on Kotaku about how you, yes you, can play BioShock Monopoly for free. If you did not see it there you might have seen it on GamesRadar, GamePro, or The Escapist . There are other sites that it is appearing on as well….

As it turns out this board game was not made by a 20 something art student in Canada, as some sources are reporting, but was actually created by your’s truly.

It may be hard to believe but I like BioShock.

This is me, dressed as a Little Sister, holding onto Songbird while standing next to Delta across from Elizabeth.

Before coming to work at Fire Hose I taught at a charter school called The Renaissance School for the Arts. There I taught a class about the art of video games. We studied video games and their place in Ludology. As an assignment I asked students to create their own board game versions of video games. The board circulating around the internet was my example to them.

The board was made both for the purposes of my class and in conjunction with a challenge issued by some members of the 2K Forums.

To make the board I spent a lot of time playing BioShock. I wanted to make sure that this was not just Monopoly with art plastered over it, but an experience that would remind players of Rapture. I started by looking at how Monopoly was set up, with the least desirable properties at the start of the game board and the prized tracts of land situated at the end; I sought to mimic this.

People that look at the board will notice that the first properties are BioShock 2′s Limbo Room and Sinclair Deluxe both of which are found within Rapture’s skid row; “Pauper’s Drop.” As you travel the board the properties become more valuable based on their fictional in game location or fan popularity. Some concessions were made, (I wanted Monopoly’s Marvin Gardens to be replaced with Arcadia due to the garden theme), but for the most part the game board mimics the original as far as property values are concerned.

The railroads have been replaced by various scientific ventures. Now you can buy Fontaine Futuristics, Ryan Industries, Sinclair Solutions, or Tennenbaum’s Safehouse.

Waterworks and Electric Company have also been replaced by Raptures two favorite vending machines: Circus of Values and El Ammo Bandito.

No more Chance or Community Chest– now it is Power to the People and Swami. The sites that featured the game board on Halloween mention that there are no cards to go with these spaces….

But I beg to differ.

The jail space features the officer splicer Ducky, and free parking sports a Bathysphere.

I may have been very thorough with my game board.

Even the money was given a BioShock treatment.

And that is how the BioShock Monopoly was made. It was made by a chick that works here at Fire Hose games.

It took me several hours to make (I would rather not admit how long) and I am very pleased to see that after being on the internet for quite some time people are still enjoying it. ^_^

**Getting back to those Swami and Power to the People cards… The cards clearly do exist and we are going to be posting them on the Fire Hose blog in the very near future!**

Everything is fine.

Alec — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 22:04:36 +0000

Ichiro is safe.

Addiction: My Favorite Type of Diction

Alec — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:34:07 +0000

Hi, my name is Alec, and I have a serious problem that is taking over my life: I am completely addicted to PUZZLE QUEST! If you haven’t taken the time to play this game yet, drop what you’re doing and go get this game. I recommend the DS or PSP versions because you never really have to stop playing when you can bring the game with you wherever you go.

Now that you have the game, be ready for your addiction to turn you into an empty husk only slightly resembling your former self. Ideal places to play are:

- In bed while you’re waking up
- In the shower (just wrap up it with a Ziplock bag! It’s totally normal.)
- On the way to work or school (use your elbows to steer)
- At work or school, especially during meetings
- While you’re eating dinner with friends (note: playing video games in a bar will cause them to check your age twice)
- During a wedding reception
- While taking the SATs
- When you’re interviewing for a new job (remember to add your experience level to your resume!)

As you journey deeper into the dark tunnel that is Puzzle Quest, you will certainly find fun new places to get your quest on. Sharing the questing with your friends is also highly encouraged – you now have the power to change their lives, so do it responsibly!

That said, there may come a time when people force you to stop playing and actually look up from your DS/PSP while talking to them. Thankfully, there is an easy solution: give them Dominion! This will give them a reason to disregard your lack of interest in their lives, while also giving you another awesome scenario where you can feed your new Dominion obsession while fiending over Puzzle Quest between hands.

Now that I’ve enabled you, go get busy: You’ve got skulls to match and Provinces to buy!

Happy questing.

SBS Named “Most Anticipated in 2011″ by PSN Stores!

Alec — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 17:25:40 +0000

Everyone at Fire Hose was super excited to come into the office today and see this new article by the good folks at PSN Stores naming Slam Bolt Scrappers one of the most anticipated games of 2011! A big thanks goes out to Eric G and the rest of the crew over there for showing us some love.

While you were all partying it up for New Years, we were hard at work adding even more gaming sweetness to Slam Bolt Scrappers, so this announcement really makes us feel the warm fuzzies. We’ve put in so many new features since we last showed off SBS at PAX Prime 2010, and the time is getting near to start telling gamers about the increased fun-ness (including NINJAS!), so stay tuned and keep on gaming!

Don’t forget to check out PSN Stores for full coverage on all things PSN.

GGJ 2010: Sprinkle

Ethan — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:49:21 +0000

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!

GGJ 2010: Post Mortem-ing a Weekend

Jason — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:28:58 +0000

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

Global Game Jam 2010: Artist Jason Reports From The Front

Jason — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:17:47 +0000

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?