Posts tagged with “The Last Bullfight”

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

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?