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Entries for tag "competitions", ordered from most recent. Entry count: 39.
# Impressions After Global Game Jam 2023
Tue
14
Feb 2023
I usually write technical blog posts to educate readers on specific topics. However, this time, I wanted to share something more personal - my experience after participating in the Global Game Jam 2023. The event took place from February 3 to 5, 2023, but only now did I find the time to write this post, as I spent a week in Munich attending the Vulkanised conference right after GGJ.
For those unfamiliar with the Global Game Jam, it's a worldwide event where participants come together to create games for fun. Unlike Ludum Dare, GGJ is not just an online/remote event. It's an opportunity to spend the weekend in person at one of many sites around the world and develop a game based on a specific, globally-announced theme within the constrained time limit. In Poland alone, there were eight sites organized in major cities. I attended PolyJam 2023 (GGJ entry, FB event), which was organized by Koło Naukowe Twórców Gier Polygon, a game development interest group at Warsaw University of Technology that I still regularly attend even though I'm no longer a student.
The theme announced for this year’s GGJ was “roots”. A theme is something that games made during the jam should be related to, or at least be inspired by. But the theme can be interpreted freely. Roots of trees and other plants are the first association that comes to mind and that most teams followed (including us), but others are also possible, e.g. a heritage like genes or culture inherited from parents and ancestors, something about indigenous people, or even… calculating mathematical square root.
Our jam site was large and well organized. KNTG Polygon has long experience in organizing such events, after many years of doing local site of GGJ, as well as their custom Slavic Game Jam. Thanks to the work of volunteers and money from sponsors, a very low entry fee ensured not only space, access to the power and Internet but also unlimited coffee, other drinks, sweets, and full catering. GGJ website says there were 124 jammers registered on the site. Although GGJ as a whole isn’t a competition, there are no winners or prizes, our local site featured a competition.
When competitions are made on game jams, there are 2 general ways of doing them:
If a team wants to win, they should take different approaches depending on this. In option 1, the game is played only by the authors, so it is enough to prepare a good-looking show for a couple of minutes. However, they need to think beforehand about what to say and how to play their game to impress people. Option 2 is essentially like preparing a booth on a gaming expo – all about attracting people, showing and explaining the game to them, and making sure the build works fine and looks playable during these few minutes when other people play it. PolyJam 2023 went for option 1. Every team had 3 minutes to present their game on stage. There were over 40 different teams, but the presentation was well organized and went smoothly.
Back to my presence there… I didn’t take part in a game jam for 2 years, since before COVID. I wanted to go there to check if I still remember how to program :) Of course I work with code in my everyday job, but quickly hacking a game jam game, which is essentially like a prototype, is something different from writing production-quality code at work. The small 2D game we made is: Roots of Life and Death. Our team was 3 people: Michał Rudnicki “Mildanach” as graphics artist, Bartek Dramczyk “Voyager” who made music and sound effects, and myself as the programmer. We’ve developed everything on a public GitHub repository. I also hosted web version of the game that can be played online. The game is about resource management – by creating new nodes (left mouse button click) and transferring resources between them (left mouse button drag&drop), player can expand the system of underground roots, create new flowers to gather more sun at the top of the map and acquire more water at the bottom. Enemy plant is playing on the other side of the screen according to the same rules, controlled by the AI.
I know the game is not finished, not very dynamic or enjoyable. What is important to me is the way we made it. In past game jams I used different technologies, ranging from a custom engine in C++, Cocos2d-x library, to Unity and Unreal Engine, which are the most popular these days. I must admit I don’t know Unity or UE too well – not as much as I wish I knew, but for this year’s GGJ I decided to try something new: I used Cocos Creator. This is a Chinese game engine that looks somewhat similarly to Unity, provides a convenient editor, features a component-based scene graph, and supports all an indie game may need (2D and 3D graphics, collisions and physics simulation, UI, sound, etc.).
The programming language used in it is TypeScript. I didn’t know either Cocos Creator or TypeScript before. Having only basic knowledge of JavaScript, I started learning them 2 weeks before the jam. I enjoyed it a lot. It is long time since I learned a new programming language, while it is always a very mind-expanding experience. I like the way TypeScript introduces strong typing into JavaScript, which is by nature a very dynamic scripting language. For example, let a: string|number; defines a variable which can contain either string or numeric values, while let eventType: 'mouseDown'|'mouseUp'; defines a variable that can hold only a string with one of these two specific values. I was learning just from a first TypeScript tutorial I found on the Internet and the official TypeScript cheat sheets.
With our game, we didn’t win the competition at our site and we were far from winning, but this wasn’t the point. I am still happy about our performance. Things that went well:
What went wrong:
Overall, participation in Global Game Jam was a fun experience. I can recommend it to everyone who likes games and feels a need to do something creative. There is no need to have a team beforehand. Some people just come and team up with freshly meet people, some make their games alone as a 1-person team. I even met some people who came but didn’t plan to make any game! They just wanted to spend this time among nice, like-minded people and do something creative, e.g. to draw new things to their personal portfolio.
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# Slavic Game Jam 2019 and our project
Thu
25
Jul 2019
Over the last weekend I took part in Slavic Game Jam 2019 in Warsaw, Poland. (See website, Facebook event, games at itch.io). It was a big one - over 200 participants, many of them coming from different countries all around Europe. The event started on Thursday with a session of talks in 2 parallel tracks. In the evening there was a pre-party in VooDoo club, with electronic music played from GameBoys and live visuals. The jam started on Friday with the announcement of the theme which was "growth". As always, this was just an inspiration, so participants were free to make any kinds of games.
During the event there was food provided, as well as fruits and vegetables, coffee, and ice cream - all for free, included in the ticket price. Also during the event there was "HydePark" organized in a separate room - something like a small Slot Art Festival where people could reserve time slots to organize their events of any kind - like a talk, a workshop, playing video games, or playing some instruments. It made me wonder if people could come to SGJ, not make any game and still enjoy themselves all the time!
The official communication between the organizers and participants happened on a designated Discord server. Organizers kept us informed about everything what's important by posting announcements to @everyone. And there was a lot happening. For example, they asked us to deliver an exactly 3-second video from our games, from which they later assembled this showreel. They were also making quality photos and posting them during the jam on the Facebook event.
The deadline for games was on Sunday midday. What's interesting is that SGJ was non competitive this time. There were no presentations of the games on stage, no voting or judging by any jury, no winners or prizes. Instead of that, everyone needed to prepare their game to be played by others at their desk. I liked that. I think it might even feel somewhat like preparing a booth at some game expo if taken seriously. Finally, as every good party has a before- and after-party, so in the evening we went to a bar :)
To summarize, I think that in some way it's quite easy to organize a (normal) game jam. You need not invite speakers like for a conference. You need not provide any hardware, as people will bring their own laptops. All you need to do is to have some venue booked for a weekend, and some marketing to invite people to come. Possibly that's why there are so many of such events. My friend once said that taking part in game jams can become a lifestyle - you can go to one almost every week. But SGJ was different. There was so much happening and it was so well organized that I'm sure it required enormous work from everyone involved. Congratulations to the entire crew, KNTG Polygon group from Warsaw University of Technology, volunteers and others!
Regarding the games created during the jam, I could see most of them were developed using Unity. Other technologies were used as well. There were few mobile games, few board games... I couldn't see many VR games. I was developing a game in a team of two, together with my friend Thomas Pendragon - just two programmers. We were planning to use Unreal but we eventually used Unity. We ended up making this game: see entry at itch.io (including binary download for Windows and MacOS).
In our game, you need to "grow" your city by creating a balanced number of places of 5 types (red for building, green for park, blue for water, yellow for airport, gray for road). The city visualization on the left is just eye-candy. You play a tile-matching game like Candy Crush Saga, but with one twist. In the bottom-center there is a Tetris-like indicator that goes up every time you make a match of some color. When all colors are matched, the bottom row is cleared - like in Tetris. If any color goes all the way to the top, you lose, so you need to consider which colors do you match to keep a good balance. That makes the game more strategic. Points are calculated for every match - more if you match 4 or 5 in a row or if something else is matched in the same move. How many points can you reach? The record during the jam was above 1000.
Thomas gave initial idea and designed the game. He did some coding (like the city building on the left), composed the music, added sound effects, made some graphics in Blender, and assembled the rest from some assets. I coded the core logic of the matching game, the whole UI, and juicing, like particle effects and animations.
As a post-mortem of this little project, here is the list of what went right:
What went wrong?
Comments | #productions #competitions #unity #events Share
# Global Game Jam 2019 - my impressions
Thu
31
Jan 2019
Last weekend the 2019 edition of Global Game Jam took place - a worldwide event where teams od developers gather in different sites all around the world to make games during two days and two nights. There was a large site in my city (Warsaw) - PolyJam, but I decided to go to Gdańsk to participate it their local site called Hackerspace Game Jam together with my friends.
Theme this year was "what home means to you". As always, participants interpreted it very differently. Those who have families associated home with all kinds of troubles caused by the other residents. Pooplers - the game I liked the most - is about babies crawling around the house and pooping competitively to cover as much surface as possible with their specific color, while avoiding the mother :) Home Alone: Cat edition is about a cat that can destroy and drop stuff from the shelves, all in first person perspective. Kapeć Defender is about a man who throws slipper (pol. "kapeć") at the wife and other people to be able to just sit and watch TV. There were more sci-fi settings as well. I liked the game Gwiezdni Somsiedzi a lot. It is the only one with multiplayer over network. Players have to control satellites flying in space, catch asteroids and throw them at the other players. Another space game was Glop where players have to cooperatively control various devices on the surface of a planet to make it fly, as well as shoot at incoming obstacles.
When it comes to technology, most teams used Unity engine. Some used JavaScript with some game framework. There was just 1 VR game. Many games included multiplayer on a single computer using gamepads, one included networked multiplayer.
Our team was a group of friends from the demoscene - 2 ex-Intel C++ developers and 2 DevOps currently working in a bank. Unfortunately we had no graphics artists. Although I would prefer to use Unity or Unreal Engine these days, we eventually decided to go the hard way and code in C++ using dxfw - the old framework developed by Krzysiek K., based on Direct3D 9. I had to remind myself this old technology before the jam, including all these D3DRS_ fixed-function pipeline states and D3DX math library. By the way: If the last version of DirectX SDK for DX9 was released in June 2010, can we already consider it a retro platform, along with Atari and Amiga? ;)
We used FMOD library for playing sound and music and Gainput for handling input from gamepads. We started from having a ray-traced sphere, so we had to code all the game logic and rendering from scratch, including displaying characters, UI, collisions, etc. We've developed some of the logic in C++ and some in Squirrel, because we had this scripting language already integrated with the framework. I had no previous experience with Squirrel, so I had to learn it very quickly. After going through the documentation, I concluded that I love it! It looks like a great scripting language for simple applications. It's not perfect, e.g. it lacks vector and matrix types so necessary in game development (just like pretty much every other programming language except HLSL/GLSL), but I like its simplicity and syntax. It is very similar to Lua in its overall philosophy - dynamically typed, object oriented, and based on key-value arrays. The syntax is not that weird though. It seems to follow the "principle of least astonishment" - it's very similar to C++, arrays are indexed from 0, plus ending statements with a semicolon is optional - end of line also works.
Participating in an event such as GGJ is always an adventure and an opportunity for many new experiences - much better than just sitting on the Internet at home. During this jam I not only learned Squirrel as a new programming language, but I've also heard what is it like to work as a programmer at a bank, I've registered on Asana (a web service for organizing TODO lists, just like Trello which I used before), and of course I had an opportunity to practice quick and dirty programming, as opposed to code carefully thought out and tested, like it has to be done in a regular job.
Finally, the game we've made is here: LazerBugz. It is a twin-stick shooter happening on a spherical surface of a planet. The "home" is the cosmic base that you have to defend while shooting at alien bugs and going out to gather randomly placed gems. It supports local co-op for any number of players using Xbox gamepads or keyboard and mouse. Some screenshots and a photo of people playing our game:
There was a competition on our site. We didn't take any of the first 3 places. We just got mention among the games who received a good number of votes. The game that won was Clash of T-Rexes - kind of Pong with two dinosaurs standing on two planets.
Official photo gallery from the event: Hackerspace Game Jam 2019
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# Few organizational advice for game jams
Wed
02
Aug 2017
I have participated in Slavic Game Jam 2017. I would like to share few thoughts that came to my mind during the event and especially during presentations.
Participation in a game jam is like any gamedev project, just on a small scale. All the rules of a successful gamedev project apply. All the rules of doing a software project apply. You need a good idea for a game, so any method of coming up with ideas (like brainstorming) may help. You need the code, so good programming practices apply as well, so you can implement features fast and not drown in spaghetti code or hard to fix bugs in the middle of the project. Experience in game design and level design is useful. Skill in making good game graphics and sound is essential as well. Some project management is needed too. Even the wisdom about work-life balance apply, because having too little sleep makes you less productive the other day (coffee or energy drinks can help a little bit though :)
There are many books about these topics. What I would like to focus on here is something different - some basic organizational things that can have decisive influence on your performance during the jam. Even if you are a great game developer, you won't deliver a good game (or win, if there is a competition) if you fail on some of these basic topics. They are related to both development process, as well as presentation on a big screen.
1. Come prepared. I don't mean making a game in advance and only adjusting it to the theme during the jam. I mean setting up some basic software environment. If you already have your team, or at least some friends who you plan to team up with, meet together before the jam, decide what technologies and tools you are going to use and set them up. This will save you a lot of time during the event.
2. Take as much hardware and cables with you as you can. You never know what you or other team members may need.
3. Finish early. It doesn't mean you need to stop polishing your game long before the deadline. It means you should strive to have a playable game many hours before the deadline, test it as early and as often as possible, and make first build that you could potentially submit at least one hour before the time is up. Maybe you will crunch and apply critical fixes and improvements to your game in the last moment, but your shouldn't count on that. Maybe the organizers will extend deadline by additional hour, but you shouldn't rely on that either. Even something as silly as compressing your game build to a ZIP file on an old laptop can take unexpectedly long time and make you miss the deadline. If you need to upload the game somewhere on the Internet, keep in mind that everyone is going to do this at the same time, so the transfer may be very slow.
4. Focus on making your game looking good during the few-minutes presentation of you playing it. That's how the game will be seen and judged. Making it fun to play for others or fun to play for many hours is a secondary goal. Of course I don't mean cheating like preparing a prerecorded video. I just mean that you don't need to have 20 levels. It's OK to have enough gameplay for just few minutes, like only a single level. It's even better when the game is fast paced and can be finished during the presentation. You may also cheat just a little, like make a keyboard shortcut for invincibility, advancing to next level or showing final credits screen.
5. Make your game easy to remember and recognize. Sophisticated or generic name and content will make people forget about it. Even if there is a list and an order of presenting games, there is often some chaos happening during presentations. Some games have technical difficulties, some teams just give up, and so viewers may be confused about which game is which. If you design your whole game around a single, simple theme (like "a butterfly") and include it everywhere: in game title, logo/menu screen, and in the graphics visible during gameplay, then everyone will be able to easily identify it and so to vote for it. You want them to later say "I liked that game about the butterfly."
6. Give your game build folder/archive some meaningful name. It should contain the title of your game, possibly the name of your team and preferably some ordinal version number. I've seen game builds called "Build.zip". That's a very bad idea. I know that for you this is a build of THE game, but for others it's just one of the games and so they need to be able to easily identify which one is it. (BTW Same rule applies to the file with your resume that you send to potential employers - don't call it "CV.pdf" :) On the other hand, version number is for you. Believe me, there will be more than one version. Calling any of these "final" is not a good idea, because you will end up with "final final", "really final" etc. :) So it's better to call your game build something like "TeamName - GameTitle v01.zip".
7. Prepare your game for difficult technical conditions during presentation. I've written separate blog post about shapes and colors that you should use: 3 Rules to Make You Image Looking Good on a Projector. Here I would like to add that you should test your game on various resolutions. Projectors tend to have small resolutions. You can also meet problems with sound (too quiet or not working at all), so make sure your game is attractive even without it.
8. Use some margin when displaying things on the screen. It is also known as "safe area". In other words, don't put critical information (like GUI elements) near the edges of the screen. It may happen that the projector is not setup correctly and your image will be cropped, making these things invisible. Same applies to time domain as well as to spatial domain: Don't show important content during first three seconds of your game. Leave some "time margin". Projector may need some time to switch to new source and resolution, so viewers may not be able to see the beginning of your game.
9. Control sound volume of your game. If you learned a little bit about giving speeches, you probably know already that you should speak loudly, slowly and clearly. When you present a game, there is another level of difficulty, because the music and sound effects from your game are played at the same time as you speak. Be aware of how loud they are so that viewers can hear them, but also can hear you speaking.
10. Remove all the distractions that your operating system may experience during the presentation. Receiving notification about incoming Skype call in the middle of your presentation would look funny, but it definitely won't increase your chances to win. Same applies to Windows deciding to install new updates in the worst possible moment on antivirus slowing down your system because it just started to scan your entire hard drive. So for the presentation:
11. Finally, prepare for your talk. Decide who is going to talk and who is going to play the game. Consider how long the presentation should be. Determine what do you want to show, what to tell and in what order. Don't do it spontaneuisly, but rather think about the presentation in advance and discuss it with your team.
Comments | #competitions #events Share
# Thoughts after Slavic Game Jam 2017
Sun
30
Jul 2017
Slavic Game Jam 2017 ended today. I have not only given a talk as a representative of the sponsor company, but I was also allowed to participate in the jam itself, so I teamed up with my old friends, some new friends that I met there and we made a game :) The theme this year was "Unknown". Our idea was to create a game about a drone flying and exploring a cave. You can see it here: This Drone of Mine.
Screenshot:
There were 2 developers in our team, 3 graphical artists and one sound/music artist. We decided to use Unreal Engine 4, despite we had no previous experience in making games with this engine whatsoever, so we needed to learn everything during the jam. We didn't do any C++ - we implemented all game logic visually using Blueprints. We also set up Perforce for collaboration, so some of us needed to learn that as well (I am fortunate to already know this tool pretty well).
We didn't win or even make it to the second round, but it's OK for me - I'm quite happy with the final result. We more or less managed to implement our original idea, as well as show almost all the graphics, sound effects, music and voice-overs, so the artists' work is not wasted. It was lots of fun and we learned a lot during the process.
You can browse all games created during the jam here: Slavic Game Jam 2017 - itch.io.
Comments | #productions #competitions #unreal #events Share
# Slavic Game Jam 2017 and my talk
Wed
26
Jul 2017
There are many game jams all around the world. Global Game Jam is probably the biggest and most popular one, but it is a global event that happens at different sites. This weekend Slavic Game Jam takes place - the biggest game jam in Eastern Europe, happening in just one site in Warsaw, Poland.
I will be there not only as a participant, but I will also give a talk, because AMD is a sponsor of the event. My talk will be on Friday at 2 PM. Its title is "Rendering in Your Game - Debugging and Profiling". I will provide some basic information and show some tools useful for analyzing performance of a game, including live demo. This information may be useful no matter if you develop your own engine or use existing one like Unity or Unreal. If you have a ticket for the event (tickets are already sold out), I invite you to come on Friday earlier than for the official start of the jam.
Comments | #teaching #events #competitions #graphics Share
# Global Game Jam 2016 - Postmortem of our project
Tue
02
Feb 2016
Last weekend, this year's edition of Global Game Jam took place all around the world. Just like in previous years, I participated in 3City Game Jam - a site in Gdańsk, Poland. It is a big one, with over 150 participants, organized by Playsoft company in their office. Theme this year was "Ritual". Regarding technology, Unity was most popular in our site, with just few games using something else: Unreal Engine, HTML5, GameMaker and C++ with SFML.
We have also used Unity. Our team consisted of 3 programmers. Here you can see our game: Bloody Eclipse, but it is far from being finished or playable. Honestly speaking, in my opinion the project on this jam went exceptionally poor. We didn't even make it to the top 10 best voted games to be presented on a big screen. That's why I'd like to share some conclusions, for you as well as for my future self.
First, it were not environmental issues that caused any problems. We all had our hardware and software set up before the jam, with Unity, Visual Studio, Git client and other tools already in place. Internet worked perfectly with transfer up to 80 Mbps in both directions. Second, it was not a lack of knowledge or skills. Our work in Unity went quite smoothly. We could deal with C#, 3D math and Git pretty well. Third, it was not because of the lack of artists in our team. Sure, graphics is very important for overall experience, but the guys who made The Bad Ritual also didn't have artists in their team and they somehow found a consistent visual style for their game, made it fun and pretty. There are many possibilities to make minimalistic and yet visually pleasant game, just like there are many free assets ready to use in Unity Asset Store.
The biggest thing that was missing in our team was management/leadership. I deliberately don't call it planning or design, because in a hectic environment like a game jam it's not enough to design the game at the beginning and then just execute. Things are changing fast, new ideas come to mind, time is running fast and new obstacles appear (like bugs or difficulties in development), so someone should have an authority to decide what to do next, keep the list of tasks "TODO" and update it constantly with priorities assigned so the most important things are done first. Noone took this role in our team. As the result, we've spent almost whole Saturday developing and polishing algorithm for enemy movement and around half an hour brainstorming and then voting for the game title, while our game used untextured, placeholder cubes and spheres as models until the very end :)
Conclusion: It's not enough to know how to code. It's also important to decide WHAT to code so that best possible result can be achieved with limited time and resources.
But the Global Game Jam as a whole is not a contest (despite our site actually was one, with PlayStation 4 for each team member as first prize) but just a fun, creative event. Despite all the problem we had I think it was fun. I had yet another opportunity to use Unity, which is a great technology. I realized I can handle Git pretty well, despite I don't feel like an expert knowing about "rebase" and such advanced stuff. I realized I still remember how to use the so much unintuitive inteface of Blender, which I learned many years ago to use in my master thesis. I could play many interesting games created on this jam, like my favorite: Witch Rite (it took 3rd place) or the one that won the contest: Acolytes: Ritual of Ascension. And finally, I've met many interesting people who do all sorts of crazy stuff, from running a company that produces medical software and hardware, to visiting escepe rooms and practicing celtic dances :)
Comments | #ggj #competitions #productions Share
# Global Game Jam 2015 - Our game: ComicsTale
Tue
27
Jan 2015
Last weekend a big event took place - Global Game Jam. As every year, thousands of people around the world had fun while making a game in 48 hours. I was in a jam site 3City Game Jam (link to site at globalgamejam.org) in Gdańsk, Poland, organized in Olivia Business Center by Playsoft Games. With 163 registered jammes, it was one of the biggest in the world (actually 24th out of 518 sites)!
Theme this year was a question: "What do we do now?" so we came up with an idea for a game that looks like a comics, where player has to choose where to click. Our team was:
Developers: Leonardo Kasperavičius, Adam Sawicki
2d artist: Ryszard Niedzielski
Game designer & producing: Frederic Raducki
And here is our game: ComicsTale (source code on GitHub). It is made in Unity (as most of the games), with 2D graphics and with mobile platforms in mind. In the voting on 3City Game Jam, we took 4th place out of around 36.
comicstales_win.zip - Windows Binary
comictales.apk - Android Binary
comictales_mac.zip - Mac Binary
It was fun to make game in a weekend. People were nice, atmosphere was great and there was free pizza! I recommend participating in Global Game Jam to anyone interested in game development. It's much more interesting than coding alone at home and submitting games to some virtual, online competitions.
