There has been a bunch of interesting things happen over the past few months. I really wish I had posted about some of this stuff closer to when it happened so I could remember it better. Oh well, take what you can get.

Triangle Game Jam 2008

Definitely the most interesting thing that I've done recently is participating in the second Triangle Game Jam. This time I did a lot more than just participate; I was actually the lead organizer of the event. Being the organizer was stressful and there was nothing fun about it, so that's not really exciting, but the event itself made it all worth it. I also updated the Jam's webpage to have pages for each of the games that were made.

Each of our Game Jam's has an agreed upon theme that all of the games adhere to. The theme for this year (which was actually my idea) was 'mad libs' - each person creates 3 lists of words containing 5 words each. One was a list of adjectives, one was a list of nouns, and one was a list of verbs. The morning of the event, we would have a program randomly generate potential game titles and we would pick out the ones that sounded the most interesting.

Double Beer Blaster

I proposed a game based off of the randomly generated title "Double Beer Blaster". The inspiration came to me because I had played Circle of Death (the drinking card game) recently, so I thought "why don't we make a drinking video game?" Drinking games make for an interesting game design premise because so many of the traditional game design rules don't apply and there are some additional restrictions incurred. In drinking games, there is no winning or loosing. You are driven by a single objective - to drink - and incurring a drink is a weird mix of both a penalty and a perk.

Actually, I'm getting off track here. If you want to read more about Double Beer Blaster, it has a short write up on the Games page of the Triangle Game Jam webpage. The point is that it was really fun to work on and we made it in approximately one weekend.

The IGDA meeting

So the Game Jam went down in May. We made 4 awesome games. About a month later, the local chapter of the IGDA held one of their bi-monthly meetings and the meeting was dedicated to presenting the results. It was really gratifying to get to show off all of our work, and to see people get excited about what we had done and the stuff we had created out of it.

My job

I've had a shift in my job responsibilities recently. Instead of working on tools (which is my traditional job responsibilities), I'm going to be working on next year's GDC demo. This means that I am actually going to be making a game at work now, which is both exciting and intimidating. Wish me luck with that; I'm sure I'll need it.

Connexus update

If anyone knows or cares, I'm still working on Connexus. Some very interesting things are happening. Specifically, a few friends and a few of the people in my office are pitching in to make AI players for the game. The thing that is cool about so many people making AI players is that we can make them battle each other. I'm actually going to try to set up a tournament in September with brackets and everything. At work we might even have a 'credibility points' betting pool. I still haven't updated the graphics, so there isn't much point in posting screenshots. If you want to know what it looks like, there are links in the post I made last October, which also conveniently discusses the results of the first Game Jam (and you can download the game I made - yay).

Sprite art

I have not had much time to do anything artistic recently. Most of my free time I'm ether working on Connexus, or not motivated enough to work on a project. I did get to do all the art for Double Beer Blaster, but in general I've been missing art.

While I was browsing the internet a while back, I came across this webpage that has some tutorials on creating sprite art. I was honestly not very impressed with his example animated game sprites; I thought to myself, I bet I could do better than this. It looked like fun too. So in a fit of inspiration, I tried to make a short pixel art sprite animation.

I learned the hard way that this is not as easy as it looks. Even on a very small scale, each line ends up being a lot more pixels than you think it will, so you end up taking forever to fill in each frame. In short, I learned that making pixel art animations takes lots of time and can get pretty mind-numbing. I can't imagine having enough devotion to creating a full game's worth of animations.

That being said, I did follow through with the one animation I wanted to make. I kept track of some of the stuff I did along the way, so I'll present each of the steps I went through here.

I started with a quick prototype animation using stick man to get a good motion

Next, I previewed some body shapes and decided whether to make a male or female character

Next, get a sense of the outfit

Create the pixel art for the base pose to figure out colors. Zoomed in 2x. Finally: ...

The finished product

So that's all for now. Later.