Announcing... the Manchester Game Jam in February!

The Manchester Game Jam is baaaack!

We'll be jamming once again at Madlab in Manchester for another one-day mini jam. It'll be the same format as before: one theme for everyone, anything goes. Last time round we made loads of party games, and at the jam before that we made games full of lasers. Lasers! We'll be announcing the theme a few days before the event, so everyone has some planning time, and both solo and group entries are both A-OK.

We're open as always to all manner of coders, designers, audio folk or just the plain game-curious. If you're interested in joining a group you can either let us know in advance, or we'll figure some groups out on the day. Not into videogames? That's fine too: in the past we've had teams create boardgames, pervasive games, games with cameras and games over live weblink to Berlin, so show us what you've got!

Here's how the last few jams went down, with lots of pictures and stuff:
http://blog.danhett.com/2012/11/manchester-game-jam-3.html
http://blog.danhett.com/2012/08/game-jam-2-madlab-august-2012.html
http://blog.danhett.com/2012/04/manchester-game-jam-in-photos.html

Anyway, here's a lovely poster for you to print out and stick directly to your face, or failing that you can click here for some more info and here to buy a ticket.

Oh, and feel free to give us a shout on twitter or drop us an email if you'd like to know more.

Gaaaaaaaames!

Honest playtesting feedback - from a 7 year-old

So, we just finished up on a reasonably large games project for kids. I can't post it here, but the gist is that it's a kid's site where they can make an avatar and create buildings to go in a little city, along with minigames and that kind of thing. Really nice, fun project.

Yesterday, we received some written feedback from our very first playtester: Holly, aged 7. It was too cute to not share:

But wait, it gets cuter. We wrote back to her, in-character, as one of the people in the game (the Mayor of the city). We've not given it her yet, but if I was a seven year old and a character from a game wrote me a letter, I'd be pretty happy! (Project title is blanked out, but you get the idea):

Bawwww.

EGP entry for November: SolarCar

Very quick and dirty one, this!

I spent five hours (ish) making a quick interactive concept for the Experimental Gameplay Project theme "Night and Day".

I came up with a little driving game where your solar-powered car slowly runs out of juice unless you drive into the light. The objective is to collect coins that increase in points value if the player combos together a longer string of coins in between charges. This creates a bit of a risk/reward thing as the player who plays it safe doesn't score big points.

It's very rough around the edges, but I think the concept works pretty well. I'd love to turn it into something more substantial at some point, perhaps as a proper racer rather than a mindless collecting exercise. It would be pretty cool to sabotage your opponents light sources to get ahead in the race, or maybe each player could be light or dark, and have to turn light sources on and off to gain an advantage.

Not bad for a few hour's work anyway, here it is: SolarCar.

The 8bitrocket 16k Retro Remake contest

The awesome guys at 8BitRocket are running a really fun sounding game design contest at the moment, to recreate classic Atari games using your tech of choice. The fun part is, the game has to be squeezed into a measly 16k! OK, so it's not as stripped down as the 1K contests, but it'll still be a good challenge (more so considering I'll be using Flash).

I've been kind of struggling with fitting in larger projects recently, so this sounds like a fun little contest that won't eat up too much of my time. I'm also a sucker for retro game design, so it would be rude not to have a go really.

Game-wise, I'm definitely only going to choose from games I've played myself on the actual Atari 7800 I owned: at the moment I'm thinking about perhaps some sort of Pitfall clone, or if that turns out to be over-ambitious then maybe something a bit easier, like a Q*bert clone. I'm not going to lie: the best game I ever played on the Atari (if not EVER) was undoubtedly Ninja Golf. If I feel brave I might have a go at it, the game itself was absolutely rubbish, but it has ninjas and golf in it. Ninjas and golf!

Anyway, sounds like fun, check more details here!

Down, Left, Right of the Living Dead!

Here's my entry for this month's Experimental Gameplay Project contest, "Boys and Girls". I decided that making a game specifically for girls or boys would be a bit rubbish (I don't really agree with dividing gamers down the middle like that), so I went for a mashup of two opposing game types instead.

What I came up with was a Dance Dance Revolution clone, that spawns zombies as you dance. A girl game, for boys:

 

Anyway, it's very rough around the edges, but the total build time was about eight hours so I think I did OK. It completely sucks as a game, but it was a ton of fun to make (and I learned a whole lot, and that's what it's about, right?)

Click here to play: Down, Left, Right of the Living Dead!

(Oh, and: a massive thanks to OELAV for hooking me up with the awesome 8-bit tune, and to Donna who made this awesome little thing out of beads that I turned into a screen zombie)