Game Jam Conclusion

Balls to the Walls came in first by 1 point! If my team had contained more than 3 people I would have been inclined to say that I didn't contribute a whole lot. Charles Roman, the president of Spartasoft, held down the programming end of things, and was really what made our game happen. Eric Musser did sound and music as well as instructions, interfaces, and credits. As mentioned in the previous post, I cooked up the art assets and some level design. I'm excited to see what the other teams came up with when we present them at the Spartasoft meeting in 2 weeks. Fun stuff, I get to be back in the lab to work on more video games in 7 hours.

Game Jam: Balls to the Walls

I've been doing a game jam with Spartasoft this weekend. Spartasoft, MSU's video game development club, holds game jams on a regular basis where the club splits into teams to make games in a 48-hour time period (or at least its usually 48 hours). Currently I'm on a team with two Media Arts & Technology majors, which I'm working on picking up as a second degree. I'm a Computer Science major, so naturally I've made a lot of the art assets.  I decided to post some of the stuff I made, being as it is currently 3:27 in the morning and I'm working on the homework displaced by the game jam.

The theme for the game jam was simply the word "save."  Our game is based around self preservation where the player is a sphere whose life meter is steadily draining.  The game is multiplayer split screen and the players control their spheres with XBox 360 controls.  Players survive by collecting health pick-ups and give themselves an edge by getting a variety of power-ups.  Our game is made with Unity3d and the art assets are made with Autodesk Maya.  The snail shown above is a negative pick-up that temporarily makes the player slower.

The shoe is the inverse of the snail and it temporarily increases the player's speed.
The rocket power-up launches homing rockets into all of the other players.  It's probably the strongest power-up in the game and will be placed in the levels.
The Chinese food grants a random power-up.   We're considering weighting it so that players low on health tend to get better power-ups.  In the last stretch of the game jam we plan on doing quite a bit of level design and play testing to tweak it so that our game becomes a legitimately fun game.