Growing is a life simulator Nornagon, Seph and I built at GameJam Sydney 2012 last weekend. This little clip shows a few parts in a progression through seasons, finding seeds, planting, and caring for life on a little stylised planet. I’m not sure where the flickery glitches came from, but they are only a recording artefact.
Best viewed with headphones on and eyes closed! Stay Tuned is a little game David and I made in about 12 hours at GameJam Sydney 2012 - inspired by the Eyes Wide Shut diversifier, it has no graphics. Your controls are left and right arrow keys, and the goal is to stay tuned in to the music. When dangerously far away, alarm bells start ringing, and if not corrected you’ll crash. Your final score is how far through the song you made it. It’s possible to win too!
Currently only available on the Google Chrome web browser, as it uses WebAudio technology not yet available in other web browser software. This will eventually be solved.
We’re currently fixing up a few little issues to make it work well when played on the web. Once that’s sorted out I’ll post a link!
A smiley girl in spectacles
Some of the questions are quite reasonable considering the circumstances: “Who is the youngest person in the room?” “Who has made a game in Unity?” Some seem utterly ridiculous – questions I couldn’t expect to ever answer. “Who has worked on a AAA title?” “Who has built a functioning robot?”
A bloody robot? Who builds robots? This isn’t Short Circuit – Johnny 5 is not alive.
“I built a robot,” pipes a fragile, female voice through the hum of chatter – and everyone pays attention. “For Halloween. It was an animatronic Squid Hat. It had motors in it. It moved around while it was on my head.”
An animatronic squid hat. Sorry, what?
The owner of said fragile voice is Jenna Fox – a smiley girl in spectacles with purple streaks though her hair. She looks and sounds like the friendliest girl in the world. She’s here for Game Jam – we all are – and this is a team-building exercise, designed to help this throng of absolute strangers come together and build a fully functioning video game in the space of 48 hours.
I was mentioned on Kotaku today. :)
(Source: kotaku.com.au)
This weekend I was a part of this year’s Global GameJam in Sydney. I ended up working on the sprites and backgrounds for Zombie Sheep (pictured) - a flash based game where you play a dog rounding up sheep to protect them from an oncoming herd of zombie sheep for as long as possible.
The experience was pretty cool. There were tons of awesome people and I made a whole bunch of really awesome new friends. Sleep deprivation sucked - I really wish it were a three day 48 hour hacking event instead of two days without break. I was also pretty disapointed that so many of the Sydney Jammers were much less interested in making fun games than in making visually impressive ones. Most of the games sucked, including the one I worked on. I hesitate to even call it a game because I contend that this thing is not fun, and that fun is the very definition of a game.
Click through to play Zombie Sheep. There’s also a prototype of the game I wanted to make, which other team members rejected (primarily because it didn’t use a path finding algorithm they insisted on writing).
Despite the sucky aspects, I had a really good time and would love to GameJam again next year — I’ll be sure to make an actual game though, even if it means going solo!
Ripple is a little game design concept I built for this month’s Experimental Gameplay Project theme: Inanimate.
Each challenge begins with bells laid out in a group, which ring with particular timing. Player then creates ripples in the white surface which trigger the bells, and succeeds at the challenge by correctly recreating the melodic pattern presented at the beginning.
If you’re using Firefox 4 or Safari 5, you can play this concept at http://creativepony.com/games/ripple/ - at the time of writing, it doesn’t work correctly in Chrome due to audio mixing issues, and I’ve not tested IE.
Two new levels in my little javascript game, Lifter. Go play them now! If you’ve not played lifter before, play from the beginning. Like them? :)
About me
‘Jenna is a smiley girl in spectacles with purple streaks through her hair. She looks and sounds like the friendliest girl in the world.’ [1]
