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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 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.
Generally gameplay ideas that requires vast amounts of time to implement are usually not very good ones. Most good games have really simple gameplay at their core.
That's correct. You generally end up with a very playable prototype, but it's not ready to sell yet.
But there's nothing stopping people from continuing to improve and polish the game after the competition.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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 :)
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.
Go to http://globalgamejam.org/ it is the same thing, (a 48 hour design and build a game session) but it is organized globally. I have done it twice now and it is so much fun. You don't need any real experience in game development, but any helps. But, even if you don't know anything about coding, art, music, or anything like that, you can still help out by being a tester, or a gopher. It's free, and very fun. The one coming up is January 27-29 and chances are, there is a site near you. If there isn't, you can start one. All you need to know is on the web site I linked. Have fun, and game on.
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.
I don't think good games require a completely new engine or completely new paradigm. That might make them interesting programs, but it doesn't have anything to do with them being interesting games.
I grew up with Infocom games. Those guys built a 10 year kingdom on their engine and it never changed substantially. I played at least half of their titles, and most of them were very good. There were a few dogs, but their strength (or weakness), and the strength of most of the good games I've played since then, has been about story, balance, and interaction. An engine can help you accomplish the things that make a good game, but a new engine doesn't make a good game, any more than using a new word processor will make you write the Great American Novel.
hell, if i had more researched using toolkits, than doing the base programming, I would have said that earlier, but without the wisdom I earned by having respect, even fear from 3d programming.
but after spending time in some toolkits, and breaking the 3d barrier relatively late in my studies of programming, I have to say, honestly, 3d is easier and way more boring to do than 2d. It just seems the other way around first. getting a good engine in 2d is way harder, while 3d is just a matter of toolkits you learn.
and on the ground base, its just reading stuff and making vectors.
Now a team of a creative type who has the ideas, and a mathematical type, who does vectors in his sleep, and some mad 3dmax guy, 3d is really fast.
Problem is always the polishing. 3d games are per se too complicated, and 90% of the time you start caring about how to make 3d look good on 2d again.
It took me a month to get through "Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours"...
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
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.
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!
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.