Category: XNA

Undead Man Lover

Undead Man Lover is the game I worked on for the 2013 Global Game Jam at the NC State location.

The jam started off rough due to a nasty winter storm, which prevented us from meeting on Friday night. We did pitches/team formation thru a combination of mumble, google+, and a wiki. Thankfully the roads cleared up enough to open the jam site on Saturday around 1 pm and we were able to jam in person for the rest of the weekend.

How to Play

  • As one of the last humans alive, you need to love you some zombies to save the human race.
  • Revive zombies and help the un-undead escape thru the portal.
  • Zombies love beating hearts, distract them with yours.
  • Spells and running take a toll on your heart.

Controls

This game can be played with a keyboard or a gamepad.

Keyboard controls:

  • Arrow keys – Movement.
  • Z – Revive the nearest zombie.
  • X – Repulse nearby zombies.
  • C – Meditate to calm your heart.

Gamepad controls:

  • [Left Stick] – Movement.
  • [A] – Revive the nearest zombie.
  • [B] – Repulse nearby zombies.
  • [X] – Meditate to calm your heart.

Download

Download either the full package or just the game.

You need the XNA4 redistributable package to play the game:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=20914

Concept

The theme was [sound of a beating heart], and we had initially been stuck in a rut creating ideas that were just ‘it’s like X but’… ‘ you manage heartrate’ / ‘in a heart’ / ‘to the beat’. After a few of these, Nick and I threw some heart-related words into the venerable madlib generator and went thru the list.

“Undead Man Lover” was one that immediately clicked, although some of the off-theme ones looked good too (maybe for a future jam…). Our final game ended up surprisingly close to the initial pitch, with only a shift from a post-apocalyptic cityscape to a fantasy setting due to art availability.

Credits

Jammers:

Additional content used under license from:

Exploding Slime Painter

This past weekend was the 2012 Triangle Game Jam. Our theme was game titles generated by madlibs: everyone contributed a list of 5 adjectives, 5 nouns, and 5 verb stems, and a program generated random game names from them. From there, we pitched ideas based on the titles and formed teams.

There were a lot of good titles, but the one I pitched and ended up making into a game is Exploding Slime Painter.  The team consisted of Mike Daly, Michael Noland, and Frank Voelker, with some sounds from Ash Gowland.

Downloads

How to Play

It’s a score-attack game for one or two players trying to paint objectives in their team color, but take time to watch in delight as slimes wobble around and explode.

  • Explode slimes to earn points and unleash their colorful painting goo
  • Paint and hold objectives in your color for a big ongoing score
  • Kicked slimes will explode on impact, giving you bonus points

Controls

Best played with an Xbox 360 controller, but can be played on the keyboard as well.

Player 1 (Red):

  • Use the arrow keys or the left thubmstick to move around
  • Press [RightCtrl] or gamepad [A] to kick slimes in front of you
  • Hold the kick button down to charge the kick, sending them father
  • Hold [RightShift] or gamepad [B] to summon red slimes to your side

Player 2 (Blue):

  • Use the arrow keys or the left thubmstick to move around
  • Press [Space] or gamepad [A] to kick slimes in front of you
  • Hold the kick button down to charge the kick, sending them father
  • Hold [LeftShift] or gamepad [B] to summon blue slimes to your side

Notes

  • Additional content was used under license from artisticdude, Daniel Cook, Charles Gabriel, and Kevin MacLeod (for more information, see the LICENSE.txt file).
  • The game should be called ‘Explosive Slime Painter’ under the madlib construction rules, but we ran with the title right out of the madlib generator as it didn’t make a difference: the slimes are explosive and they end up exploding.

Planes on a Snake

This past weekend was the 4th annual Global Game Jam, and we hosted a site in the triangle again. I was an organizer this year, but I still had plenty of time to jam, creating Planes on a Snake with my team. The theme was a picture of an ouroboros, which we interpreted by setting a shmup on the back of the world serpent.

Brief Play Description

A rift in spacetime has resulted in a large number of World War II era planes getting stuck on the world snake.
Join the frequent fliers club of Ouroboros Airlines, racking up points while taking advantage of the torus nature of your new environment.

(video contains some strong language)

You have three weapons at your disposal:

  • Single shot – the default weapon
  • Spread shot – Three times the fun
  • The Lazër – A beam weapon that goes to 11

You progress thru the weapons as you collect powerups dropped by fallen enemies.

Once the meter is at least half full, you can activate the lazër, which fires until your reserves are depleted.

Scoring

  • Bullets will fly around and around forever, so watch out for crossfire from your own shots.
  • Earn more points by hitting adversaries with shots that have been flying for a long time.
  • Death is transient on the world snake, both you and your adversaries will eventually respawn.
  • Make as many points as you can during the time limit to earn your place in the frequent fliers club.

Jammers

  • Stephen Hodgson
  • Scott Jacobs
  • Luv Kohli
  • Michael Noland
  • Chris VanderKnyff
Additional graphics by
  • David Gervais

Original GGJ page.

Download

Download the game or source code.

Screenshots:

Hubert’s Safari Adventure

A game for one player using an Xbox controller or mouse and keyboard, wherein you exterminate dodos for a tyrannosaur named Hubert.

  • Hubert runs a park with the allegedly extinct dodo.
  • You have gotten a pass to go hunting on his lands.
  • Kill as many dodos as you can in the time limit.
  • Use ice cream to attract the dodos, and then crush them!
  • Drive them before you! Hear the lamentations of the hens!
  • Bonus time and money is awarded for high-efficiency extinction.
  • The game ends when time expires.

This is the game I worked on at the 3rd Global Game Jam, where the theme was Extinction. You can see more screenshots and download the game at the global game jam page.

Team:

  • Alexander C. Park
  • Autumn Ford
  • Chris VanderKnyff
  • Harrison Moore
  • Michael Kelley
  • Michael Noland
  • Nick Darnell

Possessed: The Turing Deception

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.

Our team consisted of:

  • Michael Noland
  • Nolan Walker
  • Nick Darnell
  • Scott Jacobs
  • Alex Park
  • Harrison Moore

Technology: We used C#, XNA 3.1, the Lidgren networking library, and a PHP script for matchmaking.

Sunny Day

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

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

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…).