Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
So Close! and the Global Game Jam 2010
I don't know whether you're aware of this but last weekend saw the Global Game Jam 2010, an event organized by the International Game Developer Association promoting the development of and experimentation with the concepts of games.
The Jam itself is an event held at a single weekend all around the world. People who love developing games gather for a 48 hours hackathon, creating a full-blown game from scratch. To give you an impression of what such an event is capable of: last weekend, more than 4000 people were registered as participating in the event creating a mind-boggling 900+ games in only 48 hours. Impressive, isn't it? For a full list of games developed in Munich, have a look at our event's page.
The Jam itself is an event held at a single weekend all around the world. People who love developing games gather for a 48 hours hackathon, creating a full-blown game from scratch. To give you an impression of what such an event is capable of: last weekend, more than 4000 people were registered as participating in the event creating a mind-boggling 900+ games in only 48 hours. Impressive, isn't it? For a full list of games developed in Munich, have a look at our event's page.
For me, it was the first time I participated in GGJ - and I had hell of a good time. We met up Friday at 5pm for an initial brainstorming session which eventually led to a couple of game concepts which were pursued over the next two days. The team working on our game "So Close!" featured two Graphics Artists (Thorsten Folkers and Willi Kunth) along with our Game Design lead (Daniel Helbig of remote control productions), the Sound Masterbrain (Daniel Pharos of Knight's of Soundtrack) and myself starring as Coder of the Day. Once the initial game design was fixed, we started developing an initial prototype using cocos2d which quickly proved that our concept was indeed feasible. After a lot of initial headaches trying to get Chipmunk (a physics / collision detections engine) to work, the platforming aspect of the game fell into place and revealed a very rewarding gameplay. We spent pretty much all of Saturday evening polishing the gameplay and added some last minute mechanics on Sunday. Unfortunately, time was too short to implement Online Highscore posting using cocoslive by Sunday 5pm (the official deadline) but is scheduled for inclusion. Since we really believe in this game's concept, we're even going to release the game on the AppStore later this month!
For all you coders out there, you can grab the source code on the official GGJ website. For anybody else, you can find video footage of the game on YouTube.
GGJ has been a fun experience which I can only highly recommend to anyone who enjoys developing games or would like to have a closer look at what game development is like.
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