I just ate the most delicious meal of Bojangles I’ve ever had. The biscuit was flaky and generously buttered, the supremes and bo rounds were hot out of the … vat (or whatever they use to cook them; I don’t really want to know), the honey mustard was a little tangier than usual, and I decided to indulge myself with a bo berry biscuit as well. It helped that I hadn’t had anything to eat yet so I was extra hungry.

But that wasn’t what made it the best meal. The thing that really drove it home was that this meal was my (self-appointed) reward for completing a game for the 2010 Global Game Jam. I made a game from scratch this weekend and having it done (on time, no less) is extremely gratifying; the food tastes better, the snow is prettier, and I don’t mind George sitting on my keyboard and sneezing on the monitor as much.

Global Game Jam 2010

Just to get people up to speed; the Global Game Jam is a one-weekend event where people get together and try to build small games that conform to a surprise theme. Like last year, the Triangle area had a site hosted by Icarus Studios and organized by my friend Mike Lee.

This year, we had an exciting twist; the Triangle area got a pile of snow this weekend. This much (or any) snow is kind of unusual for the area so naturally everyone panicked and shut down. Unfortunately, the places to close included our site. This made development tricky because everyone kind of scattered and had to work remotely and Mike and I couldn’t keep an eye on each team’s progress and help out as necessary.

Nick Darnell’s alternate Game Jam site

Last year, I actually got to the jam late and ended up bouncing between a few projects, which is why I don’t have an entry in the games page for it. This year, I was concentrating on making sure that everyone else was discussing things, forming balanced groups, and had reasonable concepts so I didn’t actually really participate in the concept proposal or team forming part. I decded to strike it out on my own and try to make a game solo.

Attention Convention

The theme this year was to make a game that centered around the concept of DECEPTION and must also contain at least one of these things: a PET, a NET, or a SET.

The concept that I came up with was a multiplayer game where one player was trying to help a group of underage dudes sneak past security into an adults-only convention and the other player tries to pick the dudes out of a crowd. The first player can purchase changes to their appearance that make them harder to pick out of the crowd, at the cost of risking not bringing enough money into the convention. The second player can net anyone he wants, but netting legal attendees makes the first player have to bring less money to the convention to win.

Net trap gameplay

Instead of going on and on about it here, I’ll just point you to the newly added game page for it: Attention Convention. You might notice another recent addition to the games page. I will talk about this next time, muah ha ha!

On one closing note, if you don’t recognize some of the words in the story, be careful about learning via unfiltered google image search.