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Coding Games In 48 Hours
The Opposable Thumbs blog covers a 48-hour-long "game jam" at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Twenty teams of game developers — 16 indie and four professional — compete over a weekend to build a functional game based on a few deliberately vague keywords. This article documents the brainstorming sessions and the early prototyping work. Quoting:
"The teams become less talkative as midnight draws near and the individual team members all settle down into their jobs. Everybody seems determined to not let sleep take over just yet. I take a tour of some of the other teams. Badgers are being animated, leg movements first with static bodies above them. Other teams have no art yet and just use colored rectangles as they get the mechanics down. Others are still sketching beautiful concept art and coding level editors.'To move around the room is to hear random snippets of creativity and math. 'If we move the z-axis, too, we can do this thing' or 'what if we procedurally generated that object.' In this one spot, sixteen games are coming into being that weren't even concepts eight hours ago."
I'd love to do something like this :)
...when creating games wasn't all "as fast as possible" but much more "as good as possible"? *sigh*
Coming soon to a Facebook profile near you. I always wondered where that bilge came from. Now I know.
I miss the old 4k and 64k demo contests... or does it still exist?
This is typically a good place for creative people and I wouldn't be surprised if one day a blockbuster game come out of this kind of events.
Notch participated in one of these, and live streamed his entire session. The entire stream is here: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2011/09/27/notch-on-film/
One of the important things to understand is that even before he started, he went in having a plan based on simple ideas. He still started off in a bit of a planning phase which took around 30 minutes, but he had an idea of the things he wanted to do after hearing the key words.
From there he was on a roll - in 3 hours he had basic functionality working in a wolfenstein-like 3d engine he built from scratch almost without stopping. The rest of the time was devoted to adding game mechanics and implementing the game itself; he finished with much time to spare.
I'm not sure of the benefit of making it such a small timeframe, as that generally restricts the quality of the games to Flash based, or built upon pre-existing code they brought with them (IE, you bring along several man-weeks of labour from a previous game and build on that). It certainly doesn't lend itself to promoting innovation, although it would probably reign in some of the crazier, harder to work ideas that alot of indie devs try, and fail, to implement properly.
Then again, with the rise of small, quick, fun mobile games, that might be a good focus for anyone doing these competitions.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
That is not a game, it is a 3D program. Why do it in 3D if you only have 48 hours?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
20 teams, 20 games... :/
Here's the secret to immortality:
Ludum Dare has been doing this for years now. Every competition has a more or less vague theme or motto, and people are invited to come up with a game of any genre and implement it in a 48 hours time frame. Check out http://ludumdare.com/ for more info.
id software must have coded this one in less than 48 hours.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/06/28/0253226/Porting-Lemmings-In-36-Hours
but seriously; these code-jamming sessions are cool and all but doing so typically means cutting corners and not really having enough time to do all the appropriate testing and validation.. i mean these are great for prototyping. it is like having 10 minute abs and then someone releases a new method for 9 minutes. w00t.
You all should check out uDevGames.com. It has been running since 2001. The cool thing is the source code for ALL games is released so there is a great learning component of the contest. Plus if you like a game, you can always port it to your favorite platform.
I play games on Newgrounds sometimes. They often have game jams where games are created within so many hours. These games often go to the frontpage.
My experience with this: Usually these games are of lower quality. Often it is a good and original idea, but the implementation is lacking.
I prefer games made by someone with love and with all the time needed to polish it properly :)
The demo scene has apparently come a long way since the days of "Swinth" on the Commodore 64. Maybe a scene will develop around the Microtouch that we saw on /. yesterday.
*blink*
How does a simple gameplay mechanic remove the need to spend time and skill designing levels?
And how do you prove your simple mechanic without first designing a few levels?
Oh wait, this reminded me a lot of how EA games are created, until I could not find the part where a manager started threatening everyone.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Did a demo scene ever develop in North America, or is it still restricted to mainland Europe?
But there's nothing stopping people from continuing to improve and polish the game after the competition.
Except perhaps copyright. Can someone read the rules and find whether contestants grant a copyright assignment or exclusive license in their submissions to the competition organizer, or whether it's a non-exclusive license?
I play games on Newgrounds sometimes. They often have game jams where games are created within so many hours.
What's the best way to compete in a Newgrounds game jam without buying a copy of multi-hundred-dollar Flash CS software?
Usually these games are of lower quality. Often it is a good and original idea, but the implementation is lacking. I prefer games made by someone with love and with all the time needed to polish it properly
Time is money. If you like the game jam demo, preorder the full version.
I used to write C64 games in a week, in assembly, back in the 1980s.
I'd then port them to the C16 in a day. I was given the C16 with no documentation at all - a friend and myself spent a day reversing the ROM (my friend knew the C64 ROM really well, so we used that as a starting point) so that we could find the screen location, sound chip and joystick ports for me to use to write C16 games.
And sell them.
All I had was a C64, a cartridge based assembler/debugger, a line editor (yes no useful editor like emacs or visual studio), a 1541 floppy disk drive and a TV to view the work.
No fancy cross compilers or high level language.
None of this is exaggeration - I really did used to write the games in 7 days. It was always a bet with myself to see if I could do it again. Wrote quite a few that way.
Games were different back then. Limited displays, limited colours and sounds. The games had to be playable.
Unlike today. I hate modern games. All 3D and no gameplay. Favourite games of all time - Robotron and Defender, both by Williams.
For me to sit down and make a game like Supper Mario brothers
Supper Mario? Is that when he gets too close to one of those Venus flytrap things?
Being able to make games as fast as possible leads to making them as good as possible.
But making games for more capable hardware means the player will expect more eye-candy graphics, which creates more work for the artist compared to a game on something like, say, the NES, where players are more tolerant of simpler graphic design. See NESdev BBS discussion of the so-called "freeware complexity wall".
Could you *really* do that?
:)
I would be glad to know how.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
This has been around for quite a few years. I've participated in 2 of the 3 years. http://globalgamejam.org/jam
My brother has taken part of the global game jam for the past three years, this isn't anything new. The point of a 48 hour stint is not to make a marketable game, but how to best utilize your resources to make something small, pretty and clever with people you might have never met before. Maybe the game you make could be turned into something marketable.
The idea is to get together with other people with a common interest and passion for making games. You go into a game jam not knowing who your going to be paired up with. My brother met allot of good people both in the industry and looking to get into it. That is the true spirit of the game jam.
Reminds me of the wild demo comps they used to and still do have at the big demo parties through out Europe, the ones where thousands of people would turn up for a few days. The idea was to code a demo at the event itself during the party. http://www.assembly.org/summer10/compos/realtime/demo contains a good example of recent rules for one of these.
It's crazy enough watching people attempting to finish their entries for the regular demo comps, I can only imagine the energy at a big demo party with a wild comp category.
The great thing about programming is that you don't need a contest to set a time limit on yourself. Many years ago I did something similar, except I gave myself the whole month of September to write a game. I had (have) a bad track record of finishing the bigger projects I start, so I thought that was a good way to accomplish something. It was also an excuse to finally teach myself DirectX and improve my C++ in the process. I'd planned to make a Tetris clone, except with more of an electrical theme, and called it Electris (and holy crap I think that was 10 years ago already, now that I think about it).
Long story short, a month later, I had rendered decent 3D graphics into images for title screens, backgrounds, and game pieces, made sound effects, and even came up with two of my own music tracks. Even though I learned in the meantime that you can't really sell Tetris clones without getting sued, it didn't really matter, I had learned a lot in the process. And I was proud to have actually finished it. I've done a lot of programming in a lot of languages since then, but that one still stands out to me.
So yeah, if you've been wanting to learn a particular language or API, then set a goal of doing something fun and go for it. Otherwise, if you're anything like me, you'll just procrastinate and drag the learning process out over a much longer period. And maybe you'll want to try a real contest after that!
Twenty teams of game developers... [...] ...sixteen games are coming into being...
Are only the indie folks working on their games? What about the other four teams?
I can't check out the site now, but what kind of coding resources does it have?
I've actually worked in the game industry in the past, but in those cases it was on moderate sized teams (30 or so people) using in-house engines that were maintained and updated by a number of senior programmers. Since leaving the industry i've had plenty of ideas for fun little games i could do on my own, but writing my own game engine seems like a daunting task. Back when i started out in Pascal just writing pixels and lines to the screen was one of the easiest things ever, but i have no idea how to go about doing the same thing in a Windows environment now. I could break out my old OpenGL red book from college, but writing a 3D engine would be an order of magnitude more work and i don't really want to make 3D games anyways.
So i'd love to have references to good simple graphics packages and tutorials on how to use them. I could spend hours or days hunting around on wikipedia and forums to find the same information i'm sure, but i already have to spend enough time researching stuff for my real job. This is just something i'd be interested in for fun. I don't really want to spend more time figuring out just how to get started than it apparently takes these people to write an entire game.
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Anyone know any of the people that run this thing? I think they could really get a lot of good publicity and probably make some cash by shopping this around to some TV networks. I watch some of those cooking shows, like Chopped, where contestants have X amount of time to make some kind of entree based on certain ingredients. This contest sounds like an awfully familiar concept.
A TV show where contestants are given some keywords to create a game in 48 hours, edited down to an hour or 2 would be a really interesting concept. It would also give some indie developers some much needed recognition.
This doesn't just work with games, either. Imagine a show where groups of security researchers are pitted head-to-head to break into a system. I know they already have contests like this, but not in TV show format (that I know of). This might be a harder concept, especially if they would need to create new 0-days to crack these systems.
A lot of times, our best ideas and concepts come out of enormous pressure. I remember hearing a story of a fireman that was going to be engulfed in a large forest fire that invented the concept of controlled burning an area around him to ensure that the flames could not reach him. I really wish I could find a link to the story (If someone could provide one, I would appreciate it - a quick googling did not turn up anything). This is the same concept - I bet we would get a lot of great ideas from a show like this.
Just a curiosity I have: Did many of these games end up following the same or similar general pattern or patterns? For the actual code, I mean.
Such a thing already exists. It's called Ludum Dare.