Obligatory New Year's Post - 2014 edition

Right, so: 2014 is about up, and it's been a blast. I thought I'd try and bash out some words like I did last year. It's quite interesting looking back at what I wrote last time around - I definitely did achieve most of the resolutions I set out for myself, and failed on a few too, but either way the direction everything has gone in this year caught me by surprise as much as anyone (this is definitely a good thing).

Gamedev crash-course sessions - done!

Yesterday I finally had chance to road-test some of the beginner's game development content I've been writing, running two back-to-back sessions at Stockport Creative Festival.

MCRGameJam - September 2013

Thought I'd post some pictures of our last game jam, it was by far our most successful one-day event. We had a great turnout, and tons of ludicrously amazing games came out of it. This time around we went with five themes instead of one: CLIMBING, INVERSION, ROBOTS, STEALING & HATS.

Giant thanks to everyone for turning up and making it a great day, I had a blast even though I was feeling rubbish from a chest infection battle the week before.

Also a huge congratulations to Mark for winning the developer vote for best game, his hat-snatching multiplayer entry was absolutely amazing.



The next jam is tentatively scheduled for the 3rd November, will confirm when it's all nailed down.

Anyway, photos after the cut!

Quick and dirty jam build: Unstoppable

I took part in last month's Manchester Game Jam, this time opting to do it from home due to my scarily pregnant wife (baby Isaac is here now, but that's a different blog post entirely!).

Anyway, in about a day or so (including a bit of pre-jam cheating, fight me) I put together a quick little arcade tunnel shooter sort of thing. It looks like this:



It uses Away3D/stage3d to create wireframe graphics a la Battlezone, ditching textures entirely and creating everything from smoothed wireframe polys at runtime. It ended up being reasonably simplistic, but I was really happy with the feeeeel of it: the physics on the ship turned out really nicely, and after adding some simple directional tilting you really get the sense of a floaty ship. The ship control physics are just 2D easing so it's nice and snappy: it doesn't actually move down the Z axis: the scenery and enemies scroll backwards instead and keep respawning when they drop off behind the camera. Collision detection was awkward until I realised AS3's Point3D contains a distance checker, which saved me a bit of effort.

Below are some images I snapped while I was working through it, as you can see I almost ditched the stark wireframe in favour of coloured flat shading (like the final stage in Rez) but reverted back in the end.

I also put the whole thing on Github if anyone wants to poke around, I built it with IntelliJ Idea and I've included the whole project as it's pretty tiny. The code is absolute filth, but you can see how easy it is to get some sweet retro effects in Away3D.

Oh, and try it out here.

Tons of pics after the cut!

Manchester Game Jam, Feb 2013 - in photos!

Another month, another quick-fire game jam in Manchester!

This time we were jamming around the theme of TRAPS, and as usual everyone really pulled it out of the bag and made some amazing games.

We made, among other things: banana controllers, trapped treasure chests, magnet tanks, play-doh buttons, puns, monks, text adventures with Bruce Willis, Makey Makey hacks, laser typing challenges, and a game that got Chris running around Madlab (again).

This was my last chance to jam for a while due to the imminent baby arrival, so a giant personal thanks to everyone for making it a good 'un! (The jam will carry on running without me, in the capable hands of some of our regulars, including hopefully the full Ludum Dare weekend in April. Keep an eye on Twitter for updates!)

Full photo set after the cut!

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!

Manchester Game Jam #3

So, the third of my back-to-back jam onslaught (here's the first and second) was the Manchester Game Jam. We're almost there, stick with me.

Once again Madlab were our gracious (and f-f-f-freezing!) hosts, and we dropped lucky that day and had the place to ourselves. This was the first of our monthly one-day jams, to run alongside the big Ludum Dare jams. The feedback we had was that people couldn't always commit to a full weekend, and also that once every four months just wasn't enough game jammery. So, a monthly jam seemed like a good call. Thankfully, our jammers agreed!



Full photo run-down after the cut.

Fuck This Jam!

Whew.

I can honestly say I have spent more hours programming in the last week than I would normally do in three. Thanks to a freak of bad timing (or good timing, depending on how keen I'm feeling), I worked on stuff for three back-to-back jam events in a row, on top of my day job. I can sleep when I'm dead, right?

The first of my triple-threat jam onslaught was Fuck This Jam. Organised by the guys at Vlambeer, Fuck This Jam is a massive online gamejam to create a something in a genre you hate. Strong word, 'hate', and the idea seemed to polarise people from the off. I'm not sure I could say I 'hate' a whole genre, apart from sports games, but I think that's more an aversion to sport rather than an aversion to sport videogames.

I toyed for a while with sports management games, which sounded simple in my head: no graphics, a bunch of numbers, easy peasy. After actually sitting down and sketching ideas out however, it started to sprawl and sound more and more complex, so I canned it. Definitely the right decision. I also toyed with an actual football game, and although I canned that in the end too, it was interesting to note that quite a few people did make similar games in the end... seems like the programmer community hates sports. Who'd have guessed?

In the end I chose to look at the match-three puzzler mechanic: I don't hate puzzle games, and I don't even hate match-three puzzlers, but I do hate inane pointless puzzle games that have no challenge or objective. Puzzle Quest = good, endless none-challenging Bejewelled clones = baaad.

I lucked into meeting a chap in the Fuck This Jam IRC channel, by the name of Kieran Lampert (@CandidKlamp), and after batting some ideas around we decided to form a pan-global tag-team and work on something together. Kieran is a total ninja digital illustrator, who does 2D, 3D, and as I found out later, amazing animations too. A general all-round magician. Check it out:

The game idea came together amazingly quickly. In just one quick conversation on IRC we had a basic design doc down, and we set to work. The time difference worked out great too: I'm in Manchester in the UK, and Kieran is in Seattle, so when one of us was about to go to sleep, the other guy was waking up! This allowed us to keep the momentum going well, and meant we were never waiting on each other.

There was a load of back and forth after that initial conversation, but the basic mechanic we came up with was to swap tiles with army units on (think Advance Wars), that would then fight each other. Stats change depending on the terrain, and the unit type. If a unit is destroyed, it's removed and the tiles slide inwards like a puzzle game, and a new unit is added at the side. In keeping with the match-three idea, having adjacent units together forms a battalion and makes them stronger. Oh, and each player gets a load of turns in a row (say, five each), so they can move tactically and keep units togther, that kind of thing.

We'd pre-decided all the pixel measurements, so I was able to stick placeholder artwork in while Kieran did his thing on the other side of the planet. This is the first tilemap engine I made, with some crappy PNG's laid over the top that I screengrabbed from Kieran's email. Did the trick in a pinch:

These then became proper tiles, which turned out brilliantly. Kieran created a great little tileset with land and water, including normal and inverse transitions, which went in pixel-perfect. I cobbled together a super rough tilemapper, in the name of quickness all the levels are hard-coded arrays of values, but it was enough to get by for the jam!

Kieran also animated the units perfectly, and was even good enough to put everything straight into Flash, which meant life was pretty easy for me at the receiving end. I also managed to get the grouping working, so adjacent units are a bit stronger. This is the first debug version just after getting it working:

Everything went well overall, but as always the time factor was an issue: real life started getting in the way a bit, and before we knew it time was up. We'd managed to get everything moving and fighting, and ran completely out of time before doing any game logic. Here's how far we got:

We submitted it anyway, and we're both massively happy with where we go to: it was a valiant effort, all things considered! As a concept I think it's definitely got legs too, and now we're not frantically panicking about a deadline we've agreed that we really would like to see this made into a full game. The code for this version is horrible (as most jam code is), but the mechanic is straightforward. I'd also like to try and get it onto mobile devices too, we'll have to see how that goes. I reckon I might take Haxe for a spin, see if I can't get it compiling onto devices. Watch this space on that front....

So yes, we had a blast making this even though we didn't *quite* get there, and working with Kieran was awesome too. If this jam rolls around again, I'll definitely be taking part. I might even make a football game.

View the full playable submission here!

Announcing... the Manchester Game Jam #3!

The Manchester Game Jam is pleased to announce our November jam, which will be the first of our new shorter monthly events. We'll be back at the ever-awesome Madlab in Manchester's northern quarter.

This jam is a bit different to the weekend ones we've done previously: there'll be a single massive theme for the day that we'll announce a few days beforehand (so you guys have a bit of thinking time). As always you can use any language/technology, groups or solo efforts are both A-OK, and if you're making a none-digital game then that's fine too (in fact, we encourage it). We do have one rule though: at the end of the jam day you have to present what you've made, successful or not!

Disclaimer: as this is a very intense short jam, we (politely) suggest that beginners avoid this event and come join us for the weekend jam in December instead, where there's more time for newbies to learn the ropes a bit. As soon as the Ludum Dare guys decide on a date we'll put the word out.

So yes, jam #3 is go! Tickets will be on sale shortly, they'll be about a fiver to cover venue costs. We're not covering food to keep costs down, but there's lots of nice eateries/drinkeries in the northern quarter.

Drop us an email and we'll let you know when tickets are up, or follow us on twitter for the latest. Hope to see you there! :)

Game Jam #2 @ Madlab - August 2012

So, last weekend we threw another Manchester Game Jam to coincide with the Ludum Dare, hosted once again by the good folks at Madlab. It went really well: lots of people turned up and made lots of amazing games, and there was a street party at the end. Everyone wins.

Ordinarily I'd write a super detailed giganto-post about how it all went down, but I'm so busy at the moment I'm going to let the pictures do the talking instead.

I will say this though:

THANKYOU!

I really mean it: to everyone who lent their time and effort (particularly Bob, I owe you one), to Madlab for hosting, to Larkin' About for making a bunch of fun trouble all weekend, to every game jammer who came out and made the weekend a success: thankyou. Let's do it again sometime.

Full photo set after the cut!

GameJam posters!

My insanely talented boss Adam has come up with some amazing artwork for the game jam I'm putting together, how cool are these?

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.

"5 Buttons" - Real Life Experimental Gameplay

So I was browsing Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently, when I stumbled across a post about the new Experimental Gameplay contest. This seemed odd, until I read on and realised that this month's contest is a very exciting thing indeed. I'm a big fan of EGP anyway, and have produced a couple of hastily thrown-together games in the past. This one however takes things to a whole new level:

This month we’re partnering with 02L >  Outside Standing Level to bring you the 5 Buttons Competition. Submit your game between now and January 31st, 11:59 PST to have the opportunity to have your game displayed at the Stattbad Gallery in beautiful Berlin, Germany.

Unlike previous competitions, however, there is a bit of a twist: games will run on 02L > Outside Standing Level’s Unita Zero platform, an audio/visual playground made up of 5 pressure pads hooked up to a projector and audio system.

Exciting, eh? Of course, €1200 is a lovely incentive, but more realistically this is a great opportunity for EGP-ers to get our games played on a big canvas. A big canvas in a swimming pool. Hooked up to a sound system. In an art gallery in Germany. What's not to love? Even though I'm busier than I've ever been, this is far, far too exciting a prospect to pass up.

The EGP themes are usually pretty broad, and often this is the factor that holds me back: a completely blank slate is often quite daunting, and I usually have trouble settling on one idea. However, this contest has a slightly more defined ruleset and conditions, which I think/hope will mean that I can be a little more focussed in my approach.

There's a few technical requirements to deal with, but the requirements that affect the game design are:
- All input (from menus to gameplay) must come from pressing the number keys 1-5, that will be mapped to big pressure pads on the floor of the exhibition
- The pressure pads have up and down states, so we can tell when people are both standing on them, or getting off them
- The audio should be prominent, as it'll be hooked up to a monster audio rig in a 'club setting'
- The buttons will be spaced out in such a way that one user could activate two or possibly three of the pads at a time (this is to be confirmed)

The setting of the project has made me mentally rule out single player games. In this kind of environment the whole point I think is to engage groups of people, be that spectators or players. Going onward from that decision it's then down to considering how the group of players interact: are they playing against each other, or as a team? Again, my gut reaction given the setting would be to lean towards collaborative play. I'm certainly not ruling anything out at this stage, but my focus in getting ideas down will definitely be more along the lines of bringing users together into one gameplay experience; I love the idea of teams working together, and what's more it's a really novel way to explore multiplayer gaming in a pretty unique setting.

Needless to say, I'm excited. Expect more soon on this!