Showing posts with label game jam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label game jam. Show all posts
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Plus, for the next few days you can try the games!
Did you know that once a year, Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions (makers of Brutal Legend and Broken Age) shuts down their normal process for two weeks and hosts an in-company game jam to help identify potential new projects and team leads? That is awesome.
Monday, February 10, 2014
Resolutions
It's a new year, 2013, and time for New Year's Resolutions! This year I resolve to post on my blog every...
...wait, it's already February, isn't it?
Nuts.
Anyways, time for some quick updates:
Compact Tank
Those who followed my (failed?) game jam experiment last year know that I was working on a game called Compact Tank. It would have basically been a clone/homage to underrated Gameboy classic Trax. In it, you drove a compact tank, which is like a compact car, except it's a tank. Anyways, I picked it as a simple idea I thought I could get done in 48 hours, and now that the game jam is over I have no real motivation to finish it, although I have cannibalized the code I had working into my next project:
Mom, I'm Home
Mom I'm Home is an extremely personal project about seeing the world from a child's point of view. Much like Miyamoto and The Legend of Zelda, it's based on memories of exploring my neighborhood as a kid.
Clueball
Clueball is finished in that it works and it's playable, but it still needs a lot of finishing touches and some TLC. Hoping to finally get this up and running on FaceBook pretty soon.
Monkeys in the Playground
Monkeys in the Playground as always remains a priority. I'm hoping to relaunch it soon as less of an educational website and more of a brain training website.
More updates as they happen!
...wait, it's already February, isn't it?
Nuts.
Anyways, time for some quick updates:
Compact Tank
Those who followed my (failed?) game jam experiment last year know that I was working on a game called Compact Tank. It would have basically been a clone/homage to underrated Gameboy classic Trax. In it, you drove a compact tank, which is like a compact car, except it's a tank. Anyways, I picked it as a simple idea I thought I could get done in 48 hours, and now that the game jam is over I have no real motivation to finish it, although I have cannibalized the code I had working into my next project:
Mom, I'm Home
Mom I'm Home is an extremely personal project about seeing the world from a child's point of view. Much like Miyamoto and The Legend of Zelda, it's based on memories of exploring my neighborhood as a kid.
Clueball
Clueball is finished in that it works and it's playable, but it still needs a lot of finishing touches and some TLC. Hoping to finally get this up and running on FaceBook pretty soon.
Monkeys in the Playground
Monkeys in the Playground as always remains a priority. I'm hoping to relaunch it soon as less of an educational website and more of a brain training website.
More updates as they happen!
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Game Jam Failure?
Okay, guys, so I've done the math, and it's been... twenty hours since my last post? Really? Jeez. Clearly, this has been more difficult then I thought it would be. Not the programming part; the game is coming along swimmingly, actually. I've only been posting when I have something that makes an interesting screenshot, but I've already got it opening and parsing files for level designs.
No, the difficult parts have been:
A) Staying up all night. Fun and energizing when you're in your early twenties. Not so much when you're in your early thirties. Instead of making me goofily creative, it just made it extremely difficult to focus. And the recliner I had to sleep in, amazingly enough, kept becoming more and more comfortable.
B) Working on a project while also caring for my wife. So I guess this one is obvious in retrospect, but juggling the blog and the game with making sure my wife is ok was a lot more difficult then I was expecting. The game jam did fulfill it's primary objective nicely, which was to distract me from freaking out while she was in the operating room and recovering after. Once she was lucid and talking, however, the jam sort of lost it's priority.
So what now? I still want to finish this game -- it's a fun idea, and I still need to write a post on the premise -- and I still like the idea of blogging the game's progress. So I'll be retooling this blog, removing the game jam part, and will continue updating on the game's development as it happens. You can keep checking in on the adventures of Compact Tank (like a compact car, only it's a tank!) and even get to play some early builds when we get to that point.
I'd like to thank everyone for their support. No one's left any comments on the blog, but I've gotten a couple on Facebook, and the blog has had almost 400 hits, so I assume someone's reading this. Keep checking in, and help make Compact Tank a reality!
No, the difficult parts have been:
A) Staying up all night. Fun and energizing when you're in your early twenties. Not so much when you're in your early thirties. Instead of making me goofily creative, it just made it extremely difficult to focus. And the recliner I had to sleep in, amazingly enough, kept becoming more and more comfortable.
B) Working on a project while also caring for my wife. So I guess this one is obvious in retrospect, but juggling the blog and the game with making sure my wife is ok was a lot more difficult then I was expecting. The game jam did fulfill it's primary objective nicely, which was to distract me from freaking out while she was in the operating room and recovering after. Once she was lucid and talking, however, the jam sort of lost it's priority.
So what now? I still want to finish this game -- it's a fun idea, and I still need to write a post on the premise -- and I still like the idea of blogging the game's progress. So I'll be retooling this blog, removing the game jam part, and will continue updating on the game's development as it happens. You can keep checking in on the adventures of Compact Tank (like a compact car, only it's a tank!) and even get to play some early builds when we get to that point.
I'd like to thank everyone for their support. No one's left any comments on the blog, but I've gotten a couple on Facebook, and the blog has had almost 400 hits, so I assume someone's reading this. Keep checking in, and help make Compact Tank a reality!
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Hour Nine...
...and still going strong! Not as much progress as I'd hoped to have done at this point, but I think it's still doable. I clearly underestimated how difficult it would be to do this AND comfort my wife while fielding concerned texts and phone calls. But no matter; the show must go on!
Graphics
Graphics work!
In case your wondering, I could have gotten the tank sprite up quickly with a simple pygame.image.load command, but that would involve using a single file for every single frame of animation in the game! Instead, I found this great tutorial on sprite sheets that I was able to implement. Now for a quick break to walk around the hospital floor with my sweetheart...
Errors sound scary!
TypeError: 'list' object is not callable
My first baffling error of the day.
Off to stackoverflow.com!
UPDATE:
I tried switching the parenthesis to brackets and got this:
TypeError: list indices must be integers, not tuple
That sounds even worse! Fortunately, it was an easy fix.
My first baffling error of the day.
Off to stackoverflow.com!
UPDATE:
I tried switching the parenthesis to brackets and got this:
TypeError: list indices must be integers, not tuple
That sounds even worse! Fortunately, it was an easy fix.
Progress so far...
A quick update
My wife's surgery was a success, we're set up in her hospital room, I ate a sandwich, and fell asleep for a little while. But I've also gotten some work done! More posts coming soon.
Resolution
The next subject to tackle is resolution. I'm making this game exclusively for PC, with no plans to port to Xbox or mobile devices, so there's no reason to stick to true widescreen resolutions. Statistics show that the average monitor resolution is 1024x768, so I'm going with half of that, 512x384. This will allow me to get some quick and dirty sprite graphics down, and should scale to sizes both smaller and larger then 1024x768 nicely.
The Concept
So! The first thing to do is decide upon a concept, a game design, a platform, and a programming language to create it in. Boy, that's a lot of first things!
For platform, I'm definitely doing PC. Creating a game for a mobile device is just one too many things to deal with here in the hospital.
For game design, I think I'm going with a simple top-down tank shooter. I strongly considered doing a puzzler, but most of the actual programming for puzzle games is pretty easy; most of the challenge is in tweaking the mechanics. Also I've made a puzzle game before, and I want to push myself to try something new. A top-down shooter is complicated enough to provide a real challenge, but simple enough that I can realistically get it done within the time limit.
For programming language, I think I'm going to use Python. I wanted to avoid GameMaker or Construct 2 for this challenge, as again, it makes things too easy and the whole point is to program something from the ground up. I did consider using Unity, but the truth is I'm just barely learning how to use Unity, and too much of my time constraint would be used up just trying to figure out what I was doing. I have a good general grasp of Python and Pygame, but have never done a complete project with it, so again this seems like the right amount of challenge. Plus Python is intuitive enough that I'm expecting to be able to get things up and running pretty quickly.
As for the concept... I think I want to do something fun and silly. If I take things too seriously, my perfectionist gene will kick it and I'll never get it finished by the deadline. Stay tuned for details!
For platform, I'm definitely doing PC. Creating a game for a mobile device is just one too many things to deal with here in the hospital.
For game design, I think I'm going with a simple top-down tank shooter. I strongly considered doing a puzzler, but most of the actual programming for puzzle games is pretty easy; most of the challenge is in tweaking the mechanics. Also I've made a puzzle game before, and I want to push myself to try something new. A top-down shooter is complicated enough to provide a real challenge, but simple enough that I can realistically get it done within the time limit.
For programming language, I think I'm going to use Python. I wanted to avoid GameMaker or Construct 2 for this challenge, as again, it makes things too easy and the whole point is to program something from the ground up. I did consider using Unity, but the truth is I'm just barely learning how to use Unity, and too much of my time constraint would be used up just trying to figure out what I was doing. I have a good general grasp of Python and Pygame, but have never done a complete project with it, so again this seems like the right amount of challenge. Plus Python is intuitive enough that I'm expecting to be able to get things up and running pretty quickly.
As for the concept... I think I want to do something fun and silly. If I take things too seriously, my perfectionist gene will kick it and I'll never get it finished by the deadline. Stay tuned for details!
It begins!
So, the hospital took a little longer to check into then expected. The time is now 7:55, and I'm set up in the hospital waiting room. Let the game jam commence!
We woke up at four in the morning to get ready, I'm not expecting to get a ton of sleep on the uncomfortable couch in the hospital room, and I don't drink caffeinated beverages, so be sure to keep checking in and enjoy my descent into sleep deprived madness!
We woke up at four in the morning to get ready, I'm not expecting to get a ton of sleep on the uncomfortable couch in the hospital room, and I don't drink caffeinated beverages, so be sure to keep checking in and enjoy my descent into sleep deprived madness!
Monday, December 16, 2013
An Introduction...
My name is Matt Estes. I'm married and have one child, an 18 month old boy. We just got back from dropping him off at the babysitter. Tomorrow, at five in the morning, my wife and I will drive to the hospital in Virginia where she'll be getting her surgery. I will have nothing with me but some snacks, a prayer in my heart, and my trusty laptop. How to pass the time for the following forty hours?
The one-man game jam.
For anyone who doesn't know, a game jam is an event lasting from 24 to 48 hours in which programmers gather to stay up all night and make video games. The games must be from scratch; all unique code must be created during the jam.
Although game jams usually include anyone who wants to participate, this will be (as the name implies) a one-man game jam. I will have from the time I arrive at the hospital and get settled in (approximately 6:30am on Tuesday, Dec 17th) until the time I leave the hospital (late evening, approximately 10:30pm on Wednesday, Dec 18th) to develop an original game completely from scratch. Breaks will be taken for eating, the bathroom, checking on my wife and talking to the doctor, and possibly napping. The subject and concept for the game will be chosen at the starting time (I have a few ideas rolling around in my head but haven't settled on one yet). Updates will be posted as they happen; I may even host a live Twitch stream at some point.
So what does this have to do with you? Everything! I'll be posting updates as they happen, chronicling my failures and successes. There will be concept art, snippets of code, screenshots and video footage, and at the end, a free game to download and play! I may even host a couple of live Twitch streams. Feel free to post your feedback, suggestions, and well wishes for Emily.
The game jam starts tomorrow at 6:30am. Wish me luck!
The one-man game jam.
For anyone who doesn't know, a game jam is an event lasting from 24 to 48 hours in which programmers gather to stay up all night and make video games. The games must be from scratch; all unique code must be created during the jam.
Although game jams usually include anyone who wants to participate, this will be (as the name implies) a one-man game jam. I will have from the time I arrive at the hospital and get settled in (approximately 6:30am on Tuesday, Dec 17th) until the time I leave the hospital (late evening, approximately 10:30pm on Wednesday, Dec 18th) to develop an original game completely from scratch. Breaks will be taken for eating, the bathroom, checking on my wife and talking to the doctor, and possibly napping. The subject and concept for the game will be chosen at the starting time (I have a few ideas rolling around in my head but haven't settled on one yet). Updates will be posted as they happen; I may even host a live Twitch stream at some point.
So what does this have to do with you? Everything! I'll be posting updates as they happen, chronicling my failures and successes. There will be concept art, snippets of code, screenshots and video footage, and at the end, a free game to download and play! I may even host a couple of live Twitch streams. Feel free to post your feedback, suggestions, and well wishes for Emily.
The game jam starts tomorrow at 6:30am. Wish me luck!
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