Last evening, downtown Vancouver, I meet 3 famed fellow gamedevs: Jake Birkett (@GreyAlien), Ken Carpenter (@MindJuiceMedia) and Owen Goss (@OwenGoss). Owen (which is based in Ontario) is visiting for a week so when he announced earlier this week (on Twitter) that he had landed at YVR, we had to setup a meetup.

I probably shouldn't said "fellow" since the three of them have already shipped (or worked on) severals games on various platforms (not just iOS), while I'm just a wanabee with only a couple of half-assed prototypes under my belt. This and the background noise (I have trouble following conversations in noisy places), didn't provide much opportunity for me to participate in the discussions (we were there for about 2.5hrs) which covered the following topics (from memory):

• on being indie
• game design & development
• the iOS app store
• real estate (Ontario vs. Vancouver)
• stripclubs (not sure how the conversation ended-up there ...)

Had I check the validity of the provisioning profile before the meetup, I could have been able to show my Lunar Lander prototype ... *le sigh*. Nevertheless, it was good to meet these guys and on top of some food for thought it gave me a boost of indie energy. When I woke-up this morning, for the first time in months, I was hungry for game development ... Hopefully I'll be able to stay focused this time around? (damn you latent ADD!!)

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the post-mortem of Prince Of Persia that Jordan Mechner did at the latest GDC (link to video). It's a great way to spend +50 minutes, especially if you played the original game (on a PC for me) back in the early 90s. As usual, I took a few notes during the video, as to expand my understanding and knoweledge of game design, and here they are:

• used silent movie technics (works well for retro game animation)
• created technical proof of concept then moved onto game design
• use a modular design [of the game's world] to allow for quick move and recombination of pieces within a level, test play then iterate
• build the game to be playable at every stage of the development, gameplay may emerge as the game is been build
• a game needs a "keep playing" quality (& player rewards):
  • clear goals & subgoals
  • clear visual indication of progress
  • setbacks & triumphs along the way
  • opponents blocking player from the goal
• some lessons from the Mario franchise:
  • hours to accomplish, minutes to repeat
  • building a repertoire of skills
  • optional achievements (e.g boosting life meter) that will help the player later

Out of the 6 developers that had show interest in participating to the game jam, we were only 3 to actually be there Sunday morning. We had wanted to keep the event small by limiting it to the people we know on Twitter and in a way that wasn't such a good idea. Why the place that was made available to us (courtesy of SalesForce.com) had limited seating, we could have easily fit 10 persons. The more, the merrier right? In any case I think all 3 of us (@Nachoman, @MindJuiceMedia and myself) plus guest @dccp had some fun with a good stimulating ambiance. Next time thought, we will make sure to find a bigger venue and announce/promote the event to a somewhat wider audience (probably via meetup.com).

The theme of the game jam "magnetic, green, abyss" was randomly picked from the various words that were proposed by us all. I think it was a good way of going about finding a theme. While the chance of picking something not workable does exist, the theme can alway be re-picked until a more satisfying combination is found.

Once I started thinking about the theme, the green and abyss combined to lead me to something to do with algae. I then explored, on paper, 3 different game concepts over the course of 30 to 40 minutes (should have timed ...) before committing to one.

The first concept was based on the idea that the player will have to control a little submarine. Diving down an abyss to collect magnetic algae using a magnet attached to the bottom of the sub. Along the way, the player will have to avoid dangers (such as agressive fishes, sinking junk ...):

The second concept was pretty much the same idea, but built around a Shoot'em Up concept, where the player will have to control a little submarine slaloming down an abyss, collecting magnetic algae (by floating above them) while avoiding collisions and other dangers:

The third and final concept revolved around the idea that the player role will be to protect a patch of algae from sinking magnetic junk using a magnet loaded paddle. By either repulsing or attracting the falling junk items, the player will be able to get ride of them by making them collide into each other. Otherwise the piece will crush the algae ... Think, under-water Missile Command with magnetic force instead of missiles.

Considering that the time was limited and that I really wanted to have something somewhat working by the end of the event, the third concept was the one I decided to go for. It was also the concept that I found the most intringuing ...

While I had spend some time the previous night creating a new project in Xcode with a basic template using my 2D engine, I was clearly un-prepared for a smooth start. Since I had not touched my engine nor my game prototype for a while, I wasn't as confortable as I should have been with the engine. This caused be to waste a couple of hours hacking away on the required boilerplate code and pulling my hear out trying to figure out why I wasn't seeing anything on screen (it was for a stupid reason). Had I been better prepared I think I could have accomplished a bit more than I ended-up doing.

To speed things out a little, I tried to re-use as much as possible code from my Lander prototype. Leaving the development of more exciting graphics (e.g glowing algae) for a later time.

Here's a screenshot of the "game" at the end of the jam (I'll post a video in a later post):

Due to the lack of time, I had to spoof the magnetism, using simple forces application to the center of gravity of the falling (red) balls. While collision between a ball (junk) and one of the green rectangle (algae) will result into both object disappearing, collision between balls is utterly impossible at this point.

Overall, I was surprised of what I accomplished during that period of time, since it usually takes ages for me to get going at this sort of things. I haven't decided yet if I'll continue the game and try to release it onto the store. At least, I'll try to complete what I started at the game jam over the next couple of weeks, and see from there if the concept lives-up to my expectation of fun ...

So, the take away points from this game jam post-mortem are:

• have a clear idea of your goal for the jam (e.g try out a new engine, test some special game play ...) committing committing
• be prepared to hit the ground running once the theme is announced
• reuse as much asset as possible from your existing project(s)
• go for your easier to implement idea
• have a step-by-step development plan before you start coding away
• be ready for interruptions/distractions during the event

Since it's already the end of the week, it's time to look at the rules & goals for this sunday game jam. These were inspired by the i360 Game Jam and Ludum Dare rules:

• Rules
  • can team-up with other participant
  • can use any engines (including custom)
  • can start from an "empty" project setup (compiling and installing on device)
  • can reuse existing code and media assets
  • the resulting game must comports elements related to the jam's theme
• Goals
  • make something as original as possible and have fun doing it
  • the game should be (somewhat) playable at the end of the jam and be demoable

Comments? Suggestions? Let me know.

Since we decided to setup a game jam, I have been thinking about the best way to pick a theme for it. Since I'm sort of organising the event, and also participating in it I can just decide myself otherwise it will give me certain advantage over the other participants (is that really a bad thing?). Therefore I have been considering doing this:

• each participant must bring 3 words (or short sentences) to the jam: one thing, one color and one setting/location
• at the start of the jam, we will randomly pick a single word of each category and that will be the theme

So for example, if bunny, red, Paris are the 3 picked words, the games we will be trying to code over the duration of the event will have to be inspired by them. I don't think they will have to be centered around whatever theme we have, but the theme should have strongly inspired the game. If the combination doesn't make any sense to all of us, we will randomly pick another one. Eventually we should have something ...

Leave a comment if you have any suggestion how to make this better :) 

So, a couple of indie game developers and myself are getting together this coming week-end (Sunday April 10th) for a impromptu 8 hours long Game Jam. The general idea behind such event is to get together and try to create a video game (for iOS) within the allocated timeframe, with a shared theme and a set of agreed upon constraints. 

Game Jam are pretty popular these days (there's even competition), and while the ambiance and possible social connections are surely a big part of what make them so attractive, they offer a good opportunity to try new things while risking very little.

Since we'll be about 4 to 5 developers, I have been trying to think about what could be the best possible structure for the event, so to make the event rewarding for everyone since it'll be a small audience and a relatively short timeframe. There is three possible options I can think of:

• take the opportunity to share knowdlege/suggestion on each other (on-going) project (can this really be called a game jam anymore?)
• each participant works separately (or in small teams) on his game jam's project
• we all work on the same game jam's project, splitting the work according to devs experiences

The middle option is likely the best for this first game jam as I'm sure there will be a good amount of knowledge sharing during the event anyway ... The third will be cool, but I have so doubt that it can works well since most of us have never meet before, not to mention it's make the event feel like just another day at the day job ;-)

If you are in the Vancouver area next week-end and would like to join us for the event, drop me a note. Also if you have some suggestions for the theme of the jam, let me know.

Here are my annotated and inaccurate notes for episodes #9 and #10 of the podcast Another Castle featuring Wade Tinney and John Sharp. Once again, while both episodes were interesting, there wasn't much of the things I'm looking for:

• social games are attractive because they are built on top of existing (people) relationships
• play is a vehicle for creativity
• art has become useless since the early 20th century as it has become divorced from the [popular] culture
• games are vibrant and alive and a part of most peoples live
• games are excellent tools for preparing to future learning

Since I have fell horribly behind on the things I wanted to post on this blog related to the game I'm working on, here are my notes for episode 8 of the Another Castle podcast (featuring Wes Erdelack) as a gap filler:

• a game is about the ambiguity of a relationship to rules
• a game is a system of interesting choices
• a game is the intersection of real elements and fictive elements
• a game is an exercise in problem solving
• humans takes [some] pleasure at being subjected to rules
• finding alternate ways of accomplishing something (in the game) is an amazing experience for the player

Last week-end, I stumbled on this post by Bruce Jillis on the famous "Dragon Speech" by Chris Crawford, from 1992. Overall, I didn't get much insights into game design from it as I would have expected. Still, there was much to enjoy and I did manage to jolt down a couple of things of (some) interest, nothing very specific though:

• the human mind is an active agent
• all the higher mammals learn by playing, doing and interacting. The higher the mammal, the longer the part of his life is spend playing in preparation for adulthood
• art is way of communicating ideas, but it was in contradiction with the basic structure of the human mind (active agent) until the computer came about (ideas → Algorithms → Game → Mass distribution → Players interacting with ones ideas)
• if a game contains characters in gameplay, they must have human facial expressions, artificial personalities, language of emotional expression