nippe.teknopapu.net

Oh boy, yet another game jam completed. As a part of GetOnline 2011 Lan Party was a 48h gamedev competition that started on thursday and ended on saturday. This time the theme was Physics Platformer, so first thoughts among the participants were something along the lines of “oh, Super Mario clones, boring!”. After the theme was announced, I went to finish some updates I was doing, but I kept the theme in “idle loop” and came up with different twists to the basic platformer concepts. And then, three hours after the theme was announced, I had Unity up and running with a bunch of particles bouncing around. And so it began!

The concept was to have a 2D game with lots of particles, platforms and endless, randomized level. Now everyone knows that Unity is not really meant for 2D games, so it was perhaps a bit overkill for a simple project like this, but I took it as a learning experience, since I hadn’t made a game with Unity before this jam. Since I was working alone, I had to create all my own assets. I don’t like to grab free art from the internet, instead I try to use what I’ve made in the past and create all new models and sounds which suit the game. Twelve hours after the theme was announced, I had first playable version done. Then I did a mock up of the main character, threw a build online and I posted the link to facebook for my friends to test. That’s one thing I’ve learned from previous jams – playtest a lot, and playtest early with a release build configuration. At this point I had a particle emitter that creates rainbow smoke attached to a player controlled spherical object. The level consisted of blocks that slowly fell downwards, pulled by gravity and slowed down by drag coefficient. But wait, the sphere wasn’t actually a sphere.. it had eyes!  It was Illi!

Ok now who the f**k is Illi? As you can see in the game, Illi is a strange bird-like creature. Pink colour tells us that she’s a girl. She cannot fly, but she can jump pretty high and that’s how she’s going to access the platforms falling towards her home cloud. But why does she want to go higher? To space?

Yes, SPACEEEEEE! You see, one day she saw Nyan Cat fly past in the sky and now she wants to meet that strange rainbow cat. Illi thought they might be related somehow because they both leave a rainbow in their wake. In the game itself, you won’t find Nyan Cat.. or can you?

After that I tweaked the gameplay physics and created some sfx for the game and also started working on split-screen multiplayer mode, where Illi is accompanied by her brother Ippi (a boy, because he’s blue). Suddenly 24 hours of the game jam had passed, it was now friday afternoon, and I had been awake for 31 hours so you can guess how tired I was. I went home and slept for a bit over two hours, took a shower and went back to the Game Development Lab at KUAS to work on the game. Now for the next twelve hours I was basically just playtesting and tweaking stuff, but I added one more feature: global online scoreboard that can be viewed here. The game uses my web server to store the single player mode scores in a database for instant access and updates, the scripting part in Unity was easy, but my server was giving me some troubles, mainly because I didn’t have crossdomain.xml in place at the web server’s root folder. During the last twelve hours, I redid almost all of the physics colliders and how they affect each other, faked a glow effect, bashed my head against the wall with HSV to RGB converter script which I didn’t get to work with Unity and decided to call it a day two hours before the deadline. The game was complete and I ended up building versions for webplayer, Windows and Mac OSX. You can play the game here for now. I’m making a new version with some bugfixes and tweak the multiplayer a bit more, but there’s no set date for it – and probably it will go up to a place like Kongregate.

So, the game was delivered but the day wasn’t over. We had to go and present our games to the audience and there was also a prize ceremony coming up. There were a total of seven games in the competition so seven teams managed to finish their games. After the presentations, I joined some of the other teams for a tasty kebab treat. Then it was time for the prize ceremony. The prizes were cold hard cash sponsored by Supercell and Kajaani University of Applied Sciences. I wasn’t really expecting any success since I knew who the judges were, so I was pleasantly surprised when I got the third place and a prize of 250€. The winner was KajakNautti – a game for Windows Phone 7 (1500€) and the second place went for PogoMole (500€).

I had a great time participating this jam, and will definitely participate in other game jams in the future. Too bad there wasn’t that many teams participating this time, maybe the first year students in KUAS don’t want to become game developers as much as the students from previous years… ;)