Diving - Game Jam

Here it is! A video of the game I helped make as part of last weeks Triangle Game Jam. It's a very artsy game, driven entirely by the song. Notice the singing fish! Enjoy!

Contributers to this project included:

Brett Brown (Title Art) (Electronic Arts)

Derek Ehrman (Programming) (Atomic Games)

Vincent Scheib (Gameplay Art/Programming) (Emergnt Game Technologies)

Nolan Walker (Programming) (Emergnt Game Technologies)

The song was Feathers by Man Man.

How hard can a haircut be?

For years I've been tempted to buy a pair of hair clippers so I could cut out the middle-woman in my hair cutting routine. After all, I always just get it buzzed really short, the easiest of all haircuts, something I find paying 15+ dollars for hard to justify.

So I'm about to head to St. John Island and on my way home from work thought, ok, I'm doing it, I'm going to buy some hair clippers and from now on, I will cut my own damn hair. Screw Great Clips or Great Cuts or whatever the fuck, 15 bucks to get a buzz cut once every few months or 15 bucks ONCE, EVER, to cut my own hair for the rest of my life. Easy call.

I vastly underestimated the difficulty involved in giving ones self a buzz cut. This thing is a catastrophe and now I'm hoping my girlfriend gets over here soon to finish me off so I don't have to go into work looking like a dead squirrel.

/end_random_crap

Game Jam Happy Time Success!

Just finished the Game Jam!! Overall, I am really pleased with the way our game turned out. I had the pleasure of working with Vince Scheib and Nolan Walker of Emergent Game Technologies.

Both of these guys are top-notch and I think overall, we were all pretty stoked with the way our game turned out. A lot of the gameplay was built around synchronization with the song in question. Overall very simplistic design, but I believe the constraints really helped us end up with a high amount of polish given the time frame (less than 48 hours from start to finish!)

I will be posting more links to screenshots and video footage from both the Jam itself and the games that were created as soon as possible.

For now, feel free to check out the results of previous Jams at www.trianglegamejam.com

Trying Unity

After working in an extremely complex code base that breaches 1 million lines (scripting included), at the end of the day, sometimes you just want to make games like most other noobs. And here comes the Unity Engine, knocking on my door. This thing is game development on UBER easy mode. In fact, I'd say it's almost too easy for someone like me who is used to thinking about game development from a mindset of - how do we make interoperability between complex systems run smoothly and cleanly. In Unity, scripting aside, everything is basically drag n' drop. The tools and the workflow they have established are fresh, to say the least.

I can't, however, escape the feeling that their target audience is somewhat ... niche. It seems almost everything about the systems they expose are geared towards development of either FPS games or side scrolling games. This perception may be due to my lack of experience with the framework (I've only spent a couple of hours mucking around in the tools, mostly painting terrains...), but the tutorials, etc. they provide sure don't help me see it in a different light.

I need to begin exploring the scripting system to see if this thing is actually powerful and flexible enough to allow me to do what I want.

Triangle Game Jam

Tomorrow begins the Triangle Game Jam! This will be my first official Game Jam, and I believe it is the 4th organized Triangle Game Jam event.

For people who don't know, the Game Jam is when a bunch of developers who don't think they spend enough time making games decide to come together and attempt to build cool indie-style games in a single weekend (48 hour dev cycle!). It's probably ridiculous to point out that these games are indie-style (whatever that even means) since they're thrown together in such a short period of time.

Tonight everyone doing the Jam will be getting together for a cookout/game pitch session where we decide what games to make, form groups, and eat grilled meat (most of us, anyways).

The theme for this Game Jam is simply "music", a topic that I think will lend itself quite nicely to some really cool ideas. I'll be sure and post a link to the game I'm involved with when we're done.

First Post WIN