This is the game that we made at the 2nd annual Global Game Jam (Jan 29..31, 2010). The theme was Deception.
As a incorporeal assassin, you possess and control the bodies of innocents to further your mission of destroying rival assassins. It’s a networked multiplayer action game, where you attempt to deceive the other players into thinking you are just one of the masses, while trying to spot others when they slip-up.
It can be downloaded from the Global Game Jam page for the game. I tried to keep a running progress log over the course of the weekend, with periodic screen shots.
Sunny Day is a game that I worked on at the 3rd Triangle Game Jam with Mike Daly, Rett Crocker, and Brett Brown.
The theme for this jam was Music Video Games, to come up with a game idea based on or inspired by a song (note: not creating rhythm games).
A little girl goes for a walk. When the sun shines on her, she is happy and spreads happiness to all those around her. When she is in the shade, she is sad. You control the sun, who wants to make the girl as happy as you can. You do so by positioning the sun so that the clouds beneath you don’t end up shadowing the girl.
The concept from this game was based off of the song “Sunny Day” from the Vib Ribbon soundtrack by the Japanese music group “Laugh & Peace”.
Check out the Triangle Game Jam page for Sunny Day for a download and more information. We struck a compromise between the two day approach of previous triangle jams and the 2.5 day approach (meet and start working Friday night) in the Global Game Jam by meeting on Friday night to come up with ideas and teams over BBQ and beer, but we didn’t start coding until we met on Saturday morning.
Space Fish is a game that I worked on during the first Global Game Jam at the Raleigh-Durham site with Nick Darnell. The theme was ‘As long as we’re together, we’ll never run out of problems’.
It’s sort of a physics-sandbox game, where you can use your StarBeam to grab red or blue stars and fling them around.
Mindy the Space Fish is a persistent omnivore which will exist until the end of time. You are Mindy’s minder, feeding her pesky Red stars and keeping her from eating the pretty Blue stars.
As Mindy’s minder, you are free to ignore her. However, if you want to stick around with Mindy, your life will be full of problems.
The text we included with the game:
This is Mindy the Space Fish. Mindy likes to eat things. You are Mindy’s minder.
Care and feeding of the Space Fish:
In particular, there are Red stars and Blue stars floating about that Mindy wants to eat.
Red stars are painful to you, so you should throw them all to Mindy.
You’ve got nothing against Blue stars and would be very sad if Mindy ate them all.
You and Mindy would both be sad if Mindy ate you, but Mindy cannot help herself.
You’ve got a StarBeam that you can use to grab the nearest star and you can fling it about, either towards Mindy or away into space. We ran out of time to create a real level, so the scene is really crowded and it ended up being more of a physics sandbox than a puzzle, but with a bit more time and actual level design, it would probably be pretty fun.
There is more information, source code, and precompiled binaries available at the global game jam page for Space Fish.
Additional Credits: Patrick Sebring created the title screen, Harrison Moore made the music, and Mike Daly saved us from programmer art by making some sprites in Max and exporting them to spritesheets.
Pixelated Martini Roller is a game that I worked on during the second Triangle Game Jam with Nolan Walker and Vincent Scheib. Brad Acree did the awesome title screen artwork and the music is by STU.
You play an angry drunken olive off to discover the meaning of live, or something…
The theme for the game jam was mad libs. Everyone brought three lists of five words and we randomly generated game titles at the start of the jam, then we came up with and pitched ideas to go with the best names until we’d coalesced into teams. I highly recommend this mechanism to anyone thinking about hosting a game jam.
The game plays like time attack mode in a classic 2D platformer: you run through the level and need to hit each of the checkpoints along the way to finish. However, you won’t make it very far sober, the olive has to soak in alcohol in order to make some of the jumps. As the olive gets intoxicated, you can jump higher and run faster, but the superpowers come with some downsides: the screen becomes pixelated and the music distorted as the drunk-o-meter fills up. If the olive gets wasted, you actually lose control and cannot accurately jump or run until it sobers up.
I built the level editor (it’s built right into the game and you can toggle back and forth during gameplay), the checkpoints, the drunk-o-meter, and game flow logic (title screen, gameplay, editor, win screen, etc…).
