NYU wasn’t the only location that Quantum Box represented during the Global Game Jam. Central Florida’s GGJ site is actually Full Sail University, itself. Seeing how it’s where I go to school, I decided on attending for my second time. Since Arthur already explained what Global Game Jam was in the previous post, I’ll just go along and recite my experience.
After meeting with my Final Project team for the majority of the day, I headed towards the auditorium where the explanation of GGJ and the Keynote was going to be shown. I was mildly disappointed when they decided that the 2011 keynote wasn’t ‘informative’ enough on making a game in 48 hours, and they decided to show the 2009 Keynote instead. I was looking forward to seeing Takahashi on the large screen. But, the 2009 Keynote is still good. It’s much more geared towards how to do the Jam in 48 hours than most of the others. The 2010 Keynote remains to be my favorite.
They relayed the extinction theme onto us and we were all pretty excited. However, I didn’t realize that the announcer didn’t tell us about the Achievements for GGJ this year. This was my second disappointment, because when I was submitting the game information to the site, I couldn’t check any of those Achievement boxes. And you know how gamers feel about their Achievements.
Another change at GGJ this year was that teams were actually put together in advance, rather than previously formed. This game good team balance for all participants, so it didn’t bother me. We had 3 programmers, 2 artists, and 3 supporters who helped with designing levels and ideas. Our platform of choice was Flash, which made me pretty happy since anyone (who isn’t Steve Jobs) would be able to play it. The ideas we knocked out were actually pretty similar to the two ideas my Final Project team came up with. Seeing how neither of our artists were stellar animators, we went with a simple sidescroller with a grappling hook. Designing levels for it was pretty fun. Difficulty wasn’t a problem as any issues were solved with “Just put spikes around it”.
Tiffany, the other artist, did a great job designing the character and the backgrounds. I made a couple of tile sets (which Tiffany took and made better) and designed a couple of levels. The supporters also made levels with us as we used a simple tilemap editor for it. And the programmers were pretty well coordinated, especially with one of them learning ActionScript on the fly to make things happen. There was also Troy Turriate, a guy who was working on music for multiple teams at once. He might’ve taken on more than he could do in 48 hours, but I gotta say that his music is pretty sweet. You can enjoy it in ours.
All in all, it was a pretty fun experience. You learn a lot of things about your own skills and about working with other people. Meeting new people is always beneficial. Here’s our game in all its glory.
GGJ Link – Spare Parts
If the GGJ website is killing you because of heavy traffic you can go here instead.
Spare Parts