Go read the awesome!

But, for more current news, I went down to Philadelphia this past weekend and competed in the second annual Philly Game Jam! It started Friday at noon and went until Sunday at noon. Afterwards, there was an awards ceremony for the games. This year there were about 10 different teams, and I found out that last year there were 5 teams, one disbanded and left, and then another team had such varied perspectives on the game that they split into two teams! So, last year they had 4 or 5 games completed, and this year there were 10 games completed (we didn’t have that level of drama). It was a huge blast, and I totally want to do it again if at all possible.

Read on for the recap!

So, like I’ve said, I went to the Philly Game Expo this past weekend and competed in the 2009 Philly Game Jam. For those of you who’ve never heard of it (I hadn’t heard of it myself except that I went) a Game Jam has a few characteristics.

1. You have a certain amount of time during which to create your game. This one was 48 hours in particular.
2. You get a theme that your game must incorporate or follow. Ours was: “An age is called Dark, not because the light does not shine, but because people refuse to see.”

I don’t know if it is universal for Game Jams, but we were told to BYOE. Anything we wanted to use, we were allowed to bring, but any and all work we did must be completed on site. We were not allowed to use pre-compiled code, so if we had a Level Editor previously created for a separate game (we did,) it would not be considered legitimate, even though they couldn’t enforce that mentality (we didn’t use it, no worries.)

For more info on the whole conference, check http://gamexpo.us. For more info on the Game Jam itself, check http://www.phillygamejam.com/2009/

So, this is a long, detailed story of the event, if you don’t want to read it, I won’t be offended, I promise.

I actually went down to The College of New Jersey on Wednesday last week to be closer to Philly (I’m an hour plus North of TCNJ, and TCNJ is an hour or so East of Philly…) I had a bunch of fun trying to figure out where I was going to stay and whatnot, but we left from TCNJ at around 11am on Friday morning. We got to the Expo Center in Philly just before noon, when the contest was supposed to start, so we frantically started setting up our development areas so we could get working. There were three teams from TCNJ. We had Red, Blue, and Yellow (points if you correctly tell me what they were referencing.) My team was TCNJ Yellow. Our programmers were Mike and Jeff (me), our artists were Sam and Brian, our level designer was Steve, and our music team was Akash and myself.

About 12:10, we got our theme for the jam: “An age is called Dark, not because the light does not shine, but because people refuse to see.” Talk about deep, right?

The half of our team who was there (Mike, Steve, and I) sat down and started brainstorming game concepts with this theme. I think we finally agreed to create a platformer where the main character was a knight in shining armor. His main weapon was a whip. AWESOME, right?! Anyway, we got down to programming, and the fourth member of our team, Akash, showed up. He loved the idea as well, and coined the game “Knight Vision.” Puntasticness at its best.

About two hours later, our artists got on scene and we showed them our full game concept. If you couldn’t guess, they totally shot it down. Four hours after that, we finally decided that Mike and I would get out of the discussion that was getting no where (no matter how hard I tried) and we started getting our physics engine working correctly. Maybe a physics engine was a little too awesome for this game, but… whatever.

An hour later, after we got the physics working correctly, we turned around and heard the concept created by our game concept team. Here’s the explanation I used during the presentation portion we gave to the judges:

“You are an orb of light in a drab, gray world. The trees are devoid of leaves and color, there are no flowers, and the sky is overcast. You exist in this landscape with others of your kind, more orbs of light. They are perfectly fine with this lifestyle. However, you see a different world in this game. You see what this world could be, how beautiful and colorful this landscape could be. Your job in the game is to maneuver throughout the world and paint the leaves and flowers around the landscape so you can show the rest of the world how beautiful it can be.”

That only took us maybe… 6-7 revisions to come up with. Awesome.

So, we got to coding, and Sam and Brian started coming up with concept art. However, no art was actually started until Saturday, because we had to get everyone from our team on board with the idea. So, they went to sleep, and Mike and I sat down and started working out the kinks in the physics engine. A few hours later, I went to sleep, with the decision that I would replace Mike after I woke up.

That didn’t happen. I woke up from a really uncomfortable sleep around 8:30 in the morning, getting me about 5 hours of sleep. Sam and Brian were full at art, so I got myself ready to work. Sat down, and we started rehashing the game, again. This was like, revision 4? Something like that. Finally, Steve and Akash showed up around 11ish, and we went through revisions 5 and 6 of the game. At that point (around 12:30) we started really getting into things. So, Steve and Akash went to Wawa to go get us lunch.

After lunch, Mike hunkered down (no he hadn’t slept yet) and started really fleshing out our engine and physics. Brian and Sam started the art, and I sat down with Akash to start getting some music done. I showed Akash some of my previous work, and he decided that my method was the way to go, so I asked him for a theme. While he was building that theme, I played around in Logic Studio 8 to find cool sounds so that I could revamp his theme and make it sound awesome. I found one sound, and was like “ooh, this is cool! Let’s record this and see if Akash thinks it’s cool.” So… I did.

He loved it so much that he told me it was our music. I mean, I have no qualms about writing music, but if you couldn’t tell from this explanation so far, Akash and Steve really didn’t have any skills to go about designing a game. Or programming. So, I kinda wanted Akash to be the main composer, because otherwise he was mostly useless. He was insistent, so we sat down and I wrote music for him to critique.

But, things went a little fun. It was downpouring outside the WHOLE weekend while we were coding, and apparently the expo center has an irrigation system instead of windows to stop the rain from coming in. So, we moved over and got away from the water, and continued working. I sat down and improvised about 3 different sections of music, all using that same one sound, and then Akash and I forged through it to mix things around and make it a full theme. Turned out to be about 8-9 minutes long. I completed the music for that, and then created two quick sound effects for the game. Then, I jumped onto our development machine and started working on the audio pipeline. It worked great, until a sound had to loop. For whatever reason, XNA.Framework.Media doesn’t support continuous loop without a break between different playings of a sound. That was annoying.

The team then asked me to write up music for our credits page, which was to be “piano acoustic. I’ll write a theme for you, and then I want you to play it and I want to see where you’ll go with it” according to Akash. So, he got me a theme, which turned out to be his rendition of the ending of the credits piece, so I needed to sit down and start writing. It was about this time that we realized our physics engine didn’t work exactly the way we wanted, leaving the player to collide with objects at bizarre spots and go right through them at others. Fantastic.

The team worked on getting around this problem (Brian and Mike) and I set about starting to write that music. I felt a little bad working on music when the game was having a huge issue, but everyone else told me to get composing so I tried. I didn’t like my first piece, so I wandered around and bugged the other TCNJ teams to see what they were up to and how they were doing. I also tried going around to get some motivation for my composition. One member from TCNJ Blue played a piece for me, I can’t remember what it was, but that was the ticket. Almost two hours after starting this piece, I cleared the slate and started writing… again.

I finished the piece about an hour later, and everyone loved it… except for the last note. I suppose I’m being a little hopeful in thinking that people would like a Cminmaj7 (not dominant…) chord for the ending of a song… Whatever. So, I hung out for the rest of the night, staying awake to get some work done and do whatever needed to happen. Around 4am, I went to Wawa (a theme of this event) with a few people from TCNJ Blue and TCNJ Red. I just needed to get out of the convention center, because I hadn’t been outside of that room in almost 30 hours. So, we went to go get a really late dinner and/or a really early breakfast and then headed back to the convention center for the final push before Sunday at noon.

At that point, it was pretty much work, work, work, until we finished the game. I slept for about 40 minutes around 8:15, and we finished getting our implementation done by about 11am. We were informed that the judges would be around at 11:30 to start judging anyone who was completed. By noon, everyone had to be finished with whatever they had. We were lucky, because we finished way early.

So, after some touch-up work, we presented to the first 4 judges. When they were talking about it, I was a little worried because I didn’t know what they were saying, and I’m a pessimist. Let’s be honest, I thought they were thinking something like “Meh, been there, done that. Same old, same old concept. Looks gorgeous, though.” The 4 judges left, and we just started showing our game to anyone else who wanted to see it. One guy played our game, and the first thing he said after pulling off the headphones was “Who composed the music?” My team immediately pushed him in my direction, and we talked for a while about music and getting into the industry. It was pretty cool, so I need to follow up with him really soon.

The fifth judge came by, and I was impressed with how fast he completed the game. He played for like, 45 seconds and was done. That wasn’t a hopeful sign for me, he was rather closed-mouth about it. Finally, we packed up and moved over to the awards ceremony, which meant we had to go outside. I finally got to see sunlight since we started working on Friday. Awesome.

Remember, there are three teams from TCNJ, named TCNJ Blue, TCNJ Red, and TCNJ Yellow. That’s important for the next part of the story.

We all grab a late lunch and sit down to enjoy the meal, waiting for the awards to start. The guy starts explaining what all of the prizes are, and thanks the person who got all of the prizes donated, etc. Basically, he did the traditional “how long can I prolong this just to annoy the contestants” thing. There were two big awards given out, “Most Innovative” and “Best Adherence to Contest Theme.” Most Innovative was a prize pack that came out to be around $12k, and Best Theme was round $10k… I think.

In any case, he got to announcing the winners. “So, as if I haven’t been suspenseful so far, let’s make it even more suspenseful. The winner of ‘Best Theme’ goes to TCNJ… … … … …”

That was probably the most painful moment. I’d seen Blue’s game, and thought it was pretty cool, and what I’d seen on Saturday morning of Red’s game was really awesome too. I didn’t get to see any final products, so I had no idea what to expect.

“TCNJ Yellow!”

I sat there for a second going, “Aww, crap, we lost.” before I realized everyone else from my table (mostly not my teammates) were congratulating me. So, we headed back to get our prize package. The team from Drexel won “Most Innovative” and we all crammed into the small room where the prizes were. It was pretty awesome, I think you can see the prize list if you go to their site.

So, we all jumped back to the convention center and started packing up. Half of my team left to go home (and sleep… lucky) and I stayed with the majority of TCNJ people, because they were my ride back to campus and the train station. We packed the cars, and wandered around the convention center, trying to find the last few pieces of awesome that was left. It was kind of sparse, but I think I hit the jackpot of awesome.

I got to meet 3 of the actors from The Guild! It was pretty cool. Vork, Zaboo, and Clara were all there, and I got to talk about The Guild and how some of them got involved, and I even got to talk with Jeff Lewis (Vork) about the Game Jam and how awesome it was. Hopefully they get to post about the awesome games that were made when the guys from GameX post the game demos!

The dentist the next morning sucked. But, I suppose it was all worth it, in the end. I’ll be back soon with more about my RoR experience. Keep reading, and let me know what you think! I’ll post a link to the game demo when it gets posted.