Caracas GameJam's 2013 Beatventures

Beatventures, that's a nice name isn't it? It's the name of the game my team made at the CGJ2013, but first of all I must talk about the theme.

Last years theme was an image of Ouroboros, and we had areally hard time figuring out what to make of it (if you want to read more about that, here's the post). This year... well... it wasn't even something visible, it was a sound, a heartbeat to be precise, and obviously the first thing in everyone's mind was this:

Well, a heart, you can do great deal of stuff with a heart as a premise, sure you can. So we started our painful process of figuring out what the hell to do with our game, should the player be a heart? should the player defend the heart? We thought of many things, we even thought of doing a beat-em-up where you are the heart and fight food that is bad for the heart, like fries, hamburgers, etc, I honestly loved that idea because it was hilarious, but it was a heart and our team wanted a more abstract aproach to the theme than just playing a heart, if possible we wanted no heart to be present in the game at all.

The hours passed, food eaten, drank unhealthy amounts of coke, and then drank more coke and coffee too! the usual thing. Talking about usual, our team was spending a really long time thinking about what the game should be, which is something we seem to love too much. We were throwing random ideas on the board, going back and forth between old and new ideas, we were getting kinda desperate, at least some of us.

We were stuck, we were making no progress, so I went out of the room to get some water, and do my usual walking & thinking (just so you know, my mind seems to work 300% better when I'm walking and talking to myself), and did that for around 10 minutes, trying to go back to square one and think of a new idea from there. I thought about a character in a maze looking for something, and the closer he got to that something the faster his heart would beat, so I went back into the room where my team was and talked to them about that. We spinned the idea around a bit but in the end it was no good, althought part of it seemed to mix with the other ideas we had.

In the end, just like always, after hours and hours and HOURS of discussing (and drinking coffee and coke, of course) what the game should be, we all finally got to the same place, and decided to make a rythm game. I'm sure the whole team loved the idea.

The game had this nice mechanic, were you could only move if you were in synch with the beat of the song playing. Fantastic, I'm in love with that idea, and even more with the idea of mixing that with a top-down game where you usually have free control over your movement.

Relieved that we finally could start working at around 3 or 4 am, we began to do our jobs. This time, we had split the tasks nicely, we had one person dedicated exclusively to the music (which was hella important, rythm game remember?), other dedicated to the art and the rest of the team (three) to programming. Yikes we are finally making this game happen!!!! 

Along the way we met a friend that had been present the last jam, and although he wasn't participating, he dedicated a lot of his time there helping with the art assets and teaching our artist, so by the end of the jam we actually had 2 artists.... YAY! FRIENDSHIP!!!

Ahem, anyways, near the end of the jam we were stressed, screaming "WHY WON'T YOU WORK?! WHYY?!", hitting the keyboard with our faces, it was a pretty rough moment... Well honestly it wasn't like that, but try to imagine that happening in everyone's head at the same time... Actually, that's a lot closer to reality now that I think about it.

THE JAME ENDED!!! WOHOOOO!!! WE MADE A GAME IN ONLY 48 HOURS!!! MWAHAHAHAHA!! I admit it always feel like that, which is awesome because, well... it is. 

Our team, Origames, made Beatventures.

All the other games were really cool and I really loved what people made just from a heartbeat. I must mention that this jam was huge for us, we had around 67 people in the end participating out of 70, we were almost full! and 18 games were made!! That is plain AWESOME, the people involved in making this happen are just AMAZING :)

This photo belongs to an entry from the CGJ organizer's blog (you should check it out), Ciro Duran.

Thanks for reading, go make games will ya?

Toasty-Arepa!

And this is the near-less-than-4-months-future!! Aren't we all glad? So as I promised, here's all the art that we used for the game Toasty-Arepa! I just love it, when I came up with this idea I couldn't believe that something so simple would look so nice :O.

Of course this isn't all the art, there are more funny things but I chose these so you can get an idea of how it looks, and I must say again, I LOVE this art, looks pretty nice for me.

Sadly we didn't have enough time to show the "comic" telling the story so.... JUSTICE MUST BE MADE!!!

Enjoy.

What up??

Phew! I've been really busy lately! Spent summer doing my internship at a game development studio and investigating for my seminar, really busy.

A month ago my ninth semester started and I've been attending to classes, the usual stuff, oh and also participated in another game dev contest :D. Well this was a bit different since it wasn't the usual "melt your brain in a weekend to finish a game", this was a contest made during an event that happens anually where I study, it's called CEIDEC.It is mostly a bunch of science expositions, you know, a lot of importat people exposing their ideas and projects. Sadly i couldn't attend to any of the presentations I was interested in since I was working *sadface*.

So the contest, well we were given a whole week to develop a game, they gave us a subject just like in the good 'ol Global Game Jam. The problem this time was that, we had a lot of time, but we also had a lot of homework so we weren't in the best shape, yet we amazingly pulled an almost complete game in almost just 24 freaking hours of develop (this doesn't include the art, but that didn't took too much time anyway), that's just insane in my experience, but we also owe it to Unity which is just like magic, you just drag and drop until your fingers bleed and BOOM it's a game!

Ok, the game, right, thats important isn't it? The subject they gave us was "Hybris" which is a term used to denote something that is exagerated or excessive in some way, well that may not be the accurate definition but that's how we interpreted it for our game, which by the way was called Toasty-Arepa (if you dont know what an arepa is you should google it, easier than explaining it (yezzz the lazinezzz).

So what's this Toasty-Arepa about? well the story we came up with was a girl that was really really REALLY disastrous, she did things so wrong that she would create portals to other dimensions, pretty much what we all know would happen if someone divided by zero. So what she did wrong in this case was that she tried to cook an arepa in a toaster (nonsense, by the way) and this created a portal that transported her to a weird dimension where nothing but the floor seems to make sense at all.

The game is a simple platformer where the world was generated randomly. The objective of the player is to reach the portal to escape before the time runs out (which is when the toaster finishes "toasting"). To annoy the player there are these weird flying thingies that would just watch the player and suddenly (if given enough time) would attack mindlessly, or at least that was the idea any way. The player also has this ability to becom invinsible and kill everything they touch, but this drains their HP so they can't spend too much time in this state.

Sadly we couldn't finish enough of the game, but what the hell, the game looks nice and it was done in a really short time so yay!!!... next entry will have the art and the link to the game so you can take a look.

Oh and we decided to finish this game :) so I should be writing about it in the near-less-than-4-months-future!

Delivering the Demo

It's been a while since I wrote my last entry... so... Hey! Remember when I said some time ago that I would finish making LittleWizard's demo and leave it there because it was a learning project??? well the time has finally come to let go, at least for me.

Sadly I couldn't finish the demo (there's only one sound in the whole game! and the interaction with the user is poorly made since when I made the "messages" it was just to test stuff and see flying text which is always nice), although it is quite finished, the remaining things are pretty important for a game to be fun, but I've decided that I need to move on since I have a couple of big projects coming.

So what is the demo about? You wake up in a prison-like place, and you want to escape, pretty standard stuff.
You get out of your cell only to find a weird looking Slime spawning (the reason because the slime is the "Spawner" is because... well... I WAS going to make a spawner sprite... but never did) wisp-like things that fly towards you mindlessly. After that you encounter one of this Slawners (or maybe Slimners? I don't know, up to you). There are some chests nearby that you can open, to open a chest you gotta press "E" near one. After that you will find a room with another chest, be quick because as soon as you get close to the chest you are going to be attacked by bloodthirsty wisps, which are just as scary as a pillow. In this room the whole idea is to grab the new weapon inside the chest to be able to escape such a treacherous trap. And finally the last room, supossed to be the "boss" room, has another trap, but theres a small difference, it is a lot harder to win this room, and because of this it's expected that the player looses some HP, and because of this, his suppa-duppa ability will become available saving the player from the certain death (press and hold space to use suppa-duppa skill). And that's it, after that epic battle you just walk to the exit (no indicators that it is the actual exit besides the fact that you are not able to step into that place until you win the last battle) and... YOU WIN!

Let's make a list of the things that you should know before palying this demo:

• Move: W,A,S,D
• Shoot: Left mouse click
• Change Weapons: Q (previous) and E (next)
• Open Chest; R (have to be within 2 blocks from the chest)
• Suppa-duppa skill: Press and hold Space Bar (only usable once you reach 50% of your HP) and it has a cooldown
• Bugs: The suppa-duppa skill may move you so fast that you have a chance of merging your molecules with the wall's, turning you into an abomination thus loosing. This phenomenon is also know as being "Stuck"
• Other Stuff: The wizard's movement sprites are not finished, monsters move mindlessly towards the player at all times, chests are ugly, the 70% of the color is blue

Well that's it, this is the demo I made after so much time, but as I said before, this was a learning project and remember that when I started making this I had almost no idea about how to make a game, seeing this result is quite impressive for me, I know a bunch of stuff now that I didn't before so this kind of makes me proud.

Here is the link to download the demo, also, if you don't have XNA 4.0 Framework Redistributable installed you can get it here.

From now on I will be posting about other games I will be making sooooooo...

Thanks for Reading!!

GLOBAL GAME JAM 2012!!!!

That's right! I went to the Global Game Jam this year too! wohooo!!! and it was amazing :), I want to share a bit of my experience this year.

So... Caracas Game Jam, this year it was on a different university and my friends (who were also my team) and I were all excited about this, the event happened last weekend so it was kinda in the middle of EVERYTHING we had to do like homework, study and all that university stuff.... but even so we went!
A while after we arrived we went to the auditorium where we were going to spend a few hours listening to some important people, talk about the problems with the recent law about video games here at Venezuela and last but not least, this year's keynote speech :). I must say I am amazed by how relaxed we were at the jam, last year we were so nervous thinking we could never finish the game on time and stuff like that and this year we were like "I know I'll manage to make the game in 48 hours so I'm not going to spend time worrying about this", we could see the difference with our newest member (he's a guy that studies at our university and went to the jam alone and well, one thing led to another and he ended up on our team) because he was really worried about this time issue .
We went a bit overtime with the speeches (fed the newcomer's fears! YEAAAH!!) and so we finished watching the keynote a bit late, then we moved to the classrooms where we were going to stay the whole weekend, and at first we had mayor power issues and the fact that none of us could access the Internet, but like 2 hours later the problem was solved thanks to the fantastic staff! yay!.

THIS YEAR'S THEME IS SO FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Ouroboros.

"What? an image? not a word? seriously?" those were my thoughts when they showed it to us. My opinion is that since a word is way more concrete than an image it is kinda easier to use but... this is an image, I mean, how many things can you tell me about that image? exactly, you can't count them! And that's how my team spent it's first 5 hours of the game jam :D hitting our faces against the wall to come up with an idea related to this image that would be a good game.

Let me explain a bit how our brainstorm worked: we wrote on a board all the words that each of us related to that picture of Ouroboros, cool, no problem there, then we started to mix those words into more tangible things, like ideas of games, and when we had enough we started to vote for the one we liked the most. It took us approximately 3 hours to do this, and when we finished we ended up with 3 ideas, then we decided to work on each of them to see their pros a cons. After we did that, we called a friend of us to help us with his opinion about the ideas (he's the person that guided and worked with us in the last game jam, he knows a lot about game design so he was like our teacher that last year, and believe me, we learned so freaking much that first game jam) and his opinion was: this won't do. Just as easy as that, our dreams and hopes shattered while we watched pieces of our effort crumble into the abyss of desperation and meaninglessness!! Anyway... we started over, we had absolutely no idea what to do, our brains were just out of juice, we were spitting any idea that would dare to cross our desolated former-creative mind. After a lot of crazy stuff, we decided to go back to the game that wasn't good enough and decided to make it good enough! Just as simple as that... you like it but it's not going to work? MAKE IT WORK! And so we did and ended up with the idea that would give birth to our game: Nom.

Finally! an idea we could work with! and let me take this moment to give details about our decision: This game was intended to be infinite, since that one of the things that Ouroboros represents, it was also... well... a giant snake eating its own tail (you see the similarity with the picture? not everyone can. Hint: it's a snake eating its own tail). But that just isn't enough, if we had settled with this we would've just made a super mario clone or something like that, it just wasn't original. But we kept going and we added this need run from the snake (at this point the player was intended to be the stick figure) by using some sort of items that would appear as the player advanced though the snake's tail. In the end we decided to turn the stick figure into the bad guy and the snake into the player, and this turned out to be a lot fresher and fun, the players will feel identified with the stick figure since it has a human form, so we did have to make some kind of tutorial to let the player know that he was trying to eat the stick figure.

We had a pretty fun game in our hands, and more importantly, it was a game that could be made within 48 hours, and to prove that, I must say that we had absolutely no rush when making it, we were making every bit of the game and putting everything together, we rested when we had to, didn't have to push ourselves, for me this was a tremendous success because it seems like we managed to divide the work on our team very very well.

One last thing, I'm sure you must be wondering what the hell is going on in the game, "why is the guy running?" , "why... WHY IS THE SNAKE EATING ITSELF?!", "why can't I think of another fun quote?!". Well, here is the answer: The stick figure is called cliché, because it represents what a cliché is (very monotonous and boring), and the snake represents creativity (very colourful and not..... boring), so the stick figure is running because it wants to get to the head of the snake and kill it, why is that? Think for a second what happens when you try to create something, you will be inevitably drawn to an idea that is similar to something that already exists, this is the cliché and it represents no effort at all to invent something new (if in the game you stop trying to win, the cliché will win, which is a pretty good metaphor to represent what happens in our brains when we are just lazy to think outside the box), now, on the other hand you have the snake (you've probably already gotten the point of this, but I'm going to explain this anyway because my friend came up with this what-the-hell-are-you-smoking idea and I think it fits the game theme so frkn much that I must finish this paragraph or else/0) which represents the creativity, when you put all your efforts on being creative and really thinking of something completely unusual and different (represented here by an infinite barrage of letters that will just keep coming no matter what you do and you will inevitably lose unless you play on "noob" mode because somebody forgot to balance the difficulty on the "human" mode to make it... winnable) you eat the cliché and the creativity persists... making you.... creative... I mean creative creative not my creative.

Wow, long entry AND ITS GOING TO BE LONGER, nah just kidding, just gonna post a few pictures of the drafts we made while making the art of the game.

One more thing! my team was amazing! and I loved the art of the game :D pretty cool dontcha think?

C yas!