Month: January 2017

Boops, Beez, and Bears

In Boops, Beez, and Bears, your voice is your weapon: hum, whistle, laugh, or cry – whatever works for you, just do it fast! It’s a cross between between a horde-mode survival game and a participatory art experience; best enjoyed with a crowd, who are likely to be amused by your vocal antics while avoiding the annoying beez.

You are armed only with the vox 9000 weirding module and must survive 10 increasingly difficult waves of derpy beez and grumpy techno-bears.

Download the game (and source code / assets) at the GGJ game page.

Created for the 2017 Global Game Jam at the UNC / NC IGDA jam site by:
– Michael Noland (Twitter: @joatski)
– Nick Darnell (Twitter: @nickdarnell)
– Nich Mebane (Twitter: @Sweet_Niche)
– Travis Thompkins (Twitter: @prezthompkins)

All content and new code created for the jam is placed under a CC0 license by the jammers.

Additional credits / licensed content:

  • SharedJamUI is used under the zlib license, (C) Michael Noland
  • kissfft is is used under the BSD license, (C) Mark Borgerding
  • Several assets were used from various free UE4 samples (Stylized Landscape, Infinity Blade Content packs, etc…), some of which are only licensed for use in UE4.  These include most of the environment props and materials, the particle effects, and the bear.
  • Some CC0 assets (e.g., monkey icon) from Kenny.nl
  • Bee model (CC0 asset) from TriflingMemory
  • Code by eXi used as a starting point for the audio processing
  • Microphone icon (CC0 asset)

SharedJamUI plugin for UE4

I’ve started a plugin that implements some useful base widgets and a simple menu manager to create game user interfaces in Unreal Engine 4. It’s sort of a spiritual successor to the SharedXNA library used in most of my XNA games.

It’s open source under the zlib license, mirrored to GitHub at https://github.com/joat/SharedJamUI. There’s a bit of usage information in README.md, but it’s pretty early and should be considered ‘jam quality’ code that hasn’t been really battle tested yet. Drop me a line if you end up using it and have some feedback.

Global Game Jam 2017

For the first time, we’ve actually got multiple sites in the triangle area for the 2017 Global Game Jam, but the one I’m attending and focusing on is the UNC / NC IGDA site. As part of this, I’m giving a two-part talk with Travis Thompkins at UNC about game jams and using UE4 on Tuesday, Jan 17th at 4 PM.

Here are the slides for the first part of the talk (game jam thoughts):

Game Jam Workshop – Part 1

They’re not really meant to stand alone so I don’t know how useful they’ll be in this form, with the exception of the resources links on the last few pages.