BuildX - Make Games SA Competition

I've entered a local Game Jam Competition hosted by Makegamessa.com. This competition runs over a month and the theme was given as "Building beats Breaking", which meas that building things is a better idea than breaking things. Therefore the action word in the game must be "Build X" (example: (Build something). I took this action word literally and used it as the name of my Game. Some screen concepts can be seen below.

 

I have described my entire entry on their competition forums with more details than I would like to repeat in this blog. See My Makegamessa.com Competition Entry Page.

Happy Jamming.

Week in review

I would like to share my discoveries that I feel are most important to me. I will be briefly reviewing what I did and what I have learnt as well as sharing the top websites or blog posts that have been most helpful for the past week.

I'd like to firstly share that I attended the monthly Make Games community meetup held at City Varsity college. It's the most interesting community meetup in Cape Town by far! It's really fun meeting and chatting to local indie game developers, feeding back on their presentations and, when i'm ready, presenting my own games.

I've recently been spending some time investigating the Box2D physics engine with Fluid Simulations in my LibGDX dev environment. The implementation that I found closest to my idea was WebGL Liquid Simulator. The reason why I found that it was closest to what I was looking for was due to my recent research work regarding WebGL Shader programs (GLSL). Particularly, the very prevalent Bloom effect, which is similar to the shaders that are used in the WebGL Liquid Simulator. I will dedicate a comprehensive blog post about the Bloom effect by next week. 

A great mobile game that uses fluid simulation is called Sprinkle, see gameplay video here: Sprinkle gameplay video

Game Jam Postmortem

My first Game Jam, complete!

After a spending productive weekend at the UCT, Cape Town venue for the Global Game Jam 2015, I have some opinions and lessons learnt that I would like to share, especially to those who have not been to one, or who would like to go.

The first night was spent brainstorming and deciding which team to join. I discussed many Ideas, including my own with other would-be team members. Some ideas were ambitious, others seemed simple, yet elegant. After much talk and decisions made, the jammers formed their teams and set about planning their games.

I approached a two-man team, one that I though had an ambitious cause, and that I thought I could contribute my skills to. We assigned our tasks and began putting our ideas into an interactive prototype for proof of concept. We also decided to use Unity3D for the prototype and final product.

On the second day, we felt that our project had a direction and now we needed to come up with interesting challenges to implement in the game. By then we had decided that the Game would consist of a Two-player Split-screen interface and Gameplay that echoes 'The Room'(the game) or 'SAW' (the movie).

We came up with several puzzles for the game and the mechanics of each. And spent the rest of the day implementing the gameplay. Soon after starting, we recognised that our scope was too large and that we would need to cut some puzzles in order to finish the game on time. So we eliminated the non-essentials, or the puzzles that were not fully formed yet, and selected the top Three that we would include in the Game.

By the end of the second day we had fragments of the game that were developed and tested in isolation. We felt that we could finish the game in time by the end of the Third day.

The last day was crunch time, with all the Teams working at full steam, some of them ad worked through the night and only started later that morning. One could sense many of the teams getting their games polished, with shrieks of joy, laughter and odd computer sounds starting to emanate from the venue's room.

The last few hours, before the entry was due, flew by and hardly left my team with any integration testing time. We literally threw the various parts together in the last two hours and patched over some obvious issues as our stress levels were rising and fatigue setting in on all of us.

Many of the teams, especially the larger ones were still bug fixing by the due time and they ran into overtime.

I felt that in final analysis, we had over scoped the project and didn't focus on one single mechanic, instead we spread our skills across many ideas and mechanics which in the end contributed to a somewhat rough final product. We had learn't that the hard way and will likely improve that aspect in our next projects.

Below is a Link to our Game page, judge it lightly, feedback freely:
Escape the Cell