GGJ 2010

Two nights of deep slumber and I feel ready to write about last weekend’s Global Game Jam. For those who don’t know the event, it’s a worldwide happening where gamedesigners, -artists, -programmers and sounddesigners come together and create games in a less than 48 hour time span. The winner of the Dutch awards was a very nice platformer puzzle game, but I will save that for another post.

After some introductions we formed teams. I could have joined some friends, but thought it would be interesting to try and team up with people I didn’t know yet. We got a room assigned and immediately started brainstorming (with so much enthusiasm that we completely missed dinner). I liked the spirits of my team members but was less happy with the fact that they narrowed down immediately to the first idea to enter the table. I know 48 hours is not a long time, but this felt like an overhasty decision (Plus the concept is hardly an aspect I would economize on). I seemed to be the only one concerned with this, so I eventually gave in.

The original idea included a multi-colored level with enemies moving towards the player’s character. Consisting of the same colors as the background the trick would not be to react to masses and masses of enemies, avoiding and shooting them, but to try and find the camouflaged enemies, and then shoot them. I wasn’t convinced of the brilliance of this concept, but decided to do my very best to make this game a great game in spite of my prejudices.

About 45 hours later Stain was a playable game. An arcade shoot-em-up using an Xbox-360 controller, where the player takes the role of a disposable Key Golem, a protector of ‘the Dream’. Or in my words at that time:

As you shape the Ink colors of the Dream World, hidden Nightmares emerge, seeking your death. You are a Golem, one of many Key Guardians. Your only goal; to free as many consumed Dream Spirits before your destruction. Use the Dreams Keys to unlock Nightmares, break them, and free the consumed Spirits. Shape the Ink, reveal the deceitful Nightmares and postpone your unmaking for as long as possible. Do you have what it takes to be remembered as a Top Dreamer? Can you see through the Stain?



The player’s goal is to free as many Dream Spirits (the particles in the picture) as possible, by shooting keys at Nightmares that slowly crawl towards her. New keys can be acquired by flying into bigger Dream baubles that float through the screen now and then. Since each Nightmare comes in one of the background colors, you have to watch carefully to spot them in time. When a Nightmare hits the player, she loses a life (the Hourglasses). Three life’s and you’re out, or as we called it, “The Dream is over”. The player has one more tool at her disposal; an Ink firing gun. By holding the LT on the controller the player charges the Ink gun, and upon release fires a blob of ink onto the field. The longer the charge, the further the blob splashes onto the Dream, and the bigger the Stain. In this way the player can attempt to scout ahead for inbound Nightmares.

I learned a lot from this event. One of the lessons being that I can force myself to perform on as much as 4 hours of sleep over the whole weekend. Not something I want to do often, but it feels good to have sought out that border.

More useful are the following lessons:

Consistency /= Tutorial-says-so
Something that frustrated me most over the weekend was having to endlessly plead for consistency. For some reason the others were convinced that game world consistency comes from telling the player “this is the way it works” . Although I agree that a game world is the perfect place for breaking the rules of our reality in a virtual environment, It does not mean the game world does not need an internal consistency. I want the player to think “I can’t use my gun here because it’s obviously useless” and not “I can’t use my gun here because the designer thought the level would be too easy then.” I thank this lesson to Steven Poole, whose plea for game consistency in his book ‘Trigger Happy’ made me think about this dilemma.

Audio
No concrete lesson here, but since our group had no sound artist, I took it on me to collect and edit sound effects and background music. I learned a lot about these things by simply doing them for the first time.

Don’t ruin it
Perhaps the most harsh lesson I learned was that if something worked just prior to the Deadline, don’t exchange it with new content that can’t be tested. In my search for the perfect balancing algorithm for spawning enemies in relation to the advance of the game I forced a long logarithmic function into the game that caused the official upload to the gamejam site to be unplayable. The previous algorithm was perhaps a bit slow paced and linear but at least worked.

This concludes what I wanted to write about my experiences. I had a great time and will definitely be participating again next year. We have been invited to participate in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup. I hope the team can be brought together to really polish the game and enter into this contest. I know I’d love to.

As mentioned before I will be posting about the game Resonance, which won the Dutch first price award and public vote award. If you’re anxious to try it yourself, go here.

Rik out.