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November 13, 2010

Getting a Game Prototype Done in 13 Hours? Quick Notes on My Experience with 360iDevGameJam #360iDevGJ

Tuesday afternoon, I noticed quite a few game developers I follow on Twitter mentioning the #360iDevGameJam that’s happening that night, a game jam session for the 360 iDev Conference. I have never done a Game Jam before, and the idea of only having 13 hours to come up with an idea and create a working prototype was very appealing to me. “It’ll be a good break from the multi-month project I’ve been working on” I thought.

 

 

Concept
So a few hours later, I got started. The theme of the Game Jam was “Change the World”. I knew I didn’t have all night to come up with an idea, so I quickly started sketching out different ideas that came to mind. A few criteria that I had when developing ideas:
  1. Small in scope: The scope of the game needs to be small enough for a solo team to finish within the short amount of time.
  2. iOS control: It needs to  fit the iOS interface (touch/click, drag, pinch, or swipe).
  3. Minimum art required: I am VERY slow with art.

 

So I eventually decided to go with a simple idea that has players grow trees while juggling three different elements of life – water, air, and the sun. Since the earth is constantly shaped by these three elements, I thought it would fit the theme as well.

 

 

 

Tool
A few things I used to work on the prototype.
  1. Inkscape
  2. Gimp
  3. Unity (Unity 3D)
  4. Notebook (Hiroshige Sea by Piccadilly)

 

Making of the Prototype
Once the idea is finalized, I wanted to first get the basic controls down. But after spending almost two hours on trying to make a “swipe” control, I realized to make it work smoothly and exactly the way I wanted it to work, it could take all night. So I decided to change my focus to other areas of the game – creating the three elements, and the basic gameplay of balancing them. Instead of working on the player interface, I went with creating the mechanism that controls the game behind the scenes. This went on to take another 4-5 hours, during this time ideas were added, removed, and re-adjusted.

 

After the mechanism of the game is done, I went back to dealing with controls. I decided to use a click-and-switch control rather than the originally planned swipe control to make sure I can finish in time and still have a control that works with the game. Not the perfect solution, but good enough for a prototype. The control took another few hours to finish.

 

After the basic mechanism and control is done, it’s time to make some art. I had less than 10 art assets to make with the simple design, and quickly after the simple images were made, a few more scripts were created to handle simple animation of the images.

 

(work in progress screenshot)

 

The final step was testing. This took much longer than I wanted, as bugs were found and gameplay problems were discovered. I had to go back to changing some of the basic mechanisms as a result, and had to “hack” together solutions to a few problems that I knew I wouldn’t be able to solve quickly if I want to code it properly. This lasted for a few hours until 4:30 am in the morning, at which time I decided it’s time to wrap up.

 

Result
Here it is. “Water, Air, Sun” – The prototype I created. It took 11 hours and I was very pleased to know that I participated in a game jam and successfully made a prototype within the time allowed. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on it and I might eventually turn it into a fun side project. But for the mean time, here’s the prototype you can play in your browser. Let me know what you think! :)

 

Play it here or click on the image below.

 

 

 

Cheers,
Brandon Wu

Founder, Studio Pepwuper: http://www.pepwuper.com
Blog: http://www.plinan.com | Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/plinan | Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/wubrandon

Posted via email from Next Level with Brandon

 

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