Global Game Jam Wrap Up

In a one word summary: super-awesome-and-fucking-tiring.

In a more than one word summary, I’ll start by giving you a bit of context. Global Game Jam is a worldwide event set in one hundred and something different locations. It runs simultaneously over 48 hours where a bunch of nerds, like me, don’t sleep, don’t move, consume too much caffeine and perhaps most importantly, team up to create a game. You’re given a topic, a couple of computers and the chaos is left to settle into a bunch of cool, short game experiences.

Both of the Bit Battalion crew were in the Sydney Game Jam and it was a rather dashing jam at that. When I first walked in, I found myself looking at bunch of guys that were just about as nerdy as me. Some even managed to top that, which I’m still impressed by. A couple of guys had brought some of their own gear; one guy Chris had brought the most hectic looking set up I have ever seen. He had about 5 peripheral devices I had never seen before, his screen was a Wacom, and his computer was in a glass case. Rocking.

Just one half of the Jam

After sitting in for a few presentations that the Museum had lined up, including one by Farbs the guy that made Captain Forever, we got back into the room where we were going to be locked up for the next 48 hours. I’m not going to do any super dramatic drum roll before saying this; the theme was deception. On top of that, we had a local theme of either sewing, snowing or rowing. And it had to have an 80′s reference. Oh god.

So there I was, with 20 minutes to think of a game which would convince the rest of the group it was worth working on. Including Sam, and Sam is a hard judge. And it had to have snowing, rowing, sewing, deception and an 80′s theme.
Great.

Pretty much my diet during the Jam

I came up with a few ideas, but nothing spectacular. I was stumped really. Sam and I ended up both pitching something, but didn’t really look too far into it. There were a bunch of cool pitches, some that seemed way out of league, but actually ended up being made. I still can’t believe how well one particular game worked out; check out Gnilley.

I ended up betraying Sam for two awesome dudes from Soap Creative. Ash and Hendrik had pitched an idea involving luring people in, then brutally massacring as many of them as possible in one move. I figured the idea sounded inherently fun, which meant that even if it wasn’t fully complete by the end of the jam, it would still be a pretty damn cool.

Me and Hendrik, working hard

I just have to point out now, these guys were absolutely amazing to work with! Hendrik is such talented guy, my god. He’s an amazing artist as well as a genius programmer, a guy with natural talent that everyone wishes they had. You can check out his stuff at here. Ash knew his stuff, he’d run soapcreative.com for 8 years, so he’d kept us on track well, and managed to churn out AS2 more quickly then I had ever seen. Sure it was rough, but the guy did so much coding so quickly, it was insane! Oh, and I helped! Woot. Go team ginger beer.

The next 48 hours involved a total of 3 hours of bad sleep, about 15 red bulls (we had a fridge full of them), and a whole bunch of game design. We had some awesome plans for our game “Tentacle”, which involved tactically moving about a map to avoid police while luring people in. Police were going to be able see line of sight, and you were supposed to lure people out from under their noses to kill them in one big giant explosion of tentacles. We got the police in, and we got the killing in, but we totally missed out on anything that resembles tactics. Our game turned into a giant bloody blood fest of death. We concentrated heaps on getting the graphics and audio spot on, so that the game really had a satisfying sensory experience. We put a bunch of work into music, the intro and GUI. It was probably the most complete game of the bunch, but the least ambitious as well.

Yup, this pretty much sums up our game.

It was a satisfying game to play. Nothing beats lining up about 50 innocent little people and brutally massacring them, spreading limbs everywhere while the game screams at you “F@*%ED UP”. Deep gameplay, right? We finished up pretty early as well, and even managed to polish everything off.

Everyone finally all staggered into the presentation room, where we showed off our games. There were so many cool games, I’d love to go into detail describing them all. I already gave you my personal favorite, which was Gnilley, but there were a bunch of other cool ones, some involving gesture recognition, tactical networked gameplay and bunch of other cool stuff. Farbs’ Break Up was an awesome clone of breakout, which unveiled a hidden message as you broke the tiles. It was some seriously original and cool stuff.

Presentation Hall

And we won!

I was pretty god damn happy with that. It meant a whole lot of interviews. We’ll be appearing on the ABC’s Good Game, and on byteside.com. I’ll update when they’ve come online! If you can dig up any more media around the event, feel free to comment about it just below.