GGJ 2012 Melbourne(2) – 25 no 24 hours left no tiem for spell check ohmyg
 Pika, pikachu. Pikapika, chu, chu, pika pi!
Sunday Spent the night dreaming that I lost my ability to walk, could only roll in circular motions. Breakfast consisted of cereal and coffee. Ate some coffee ground too.  Am I Kojima yet? Kojima uses "precision spoons" too right? Running out of space on paper, just like back in school drawing title pages and using the entire page for the “Scien” and having to cram tiny “ce” down the end. Found out the name of our game, Whirlstrom. Weren’t sure if it would stick. Now we need to know the team name. Tripped over a sleeping man. Ate more coffee ground.
 "Dooo iiit Dood, before Queen Etna wakes up!" Unsure if my team requested psychedelic rainbows or if I dreamed it. Had an apple. Noticed the sticker after eating it on said apple. Wait what five minutes left what is this madness?! Oh never mind. Misheard. 55 minutes.  aaaaaaa Explosion animation no longer needed. Looked better that way. Three. Two. One. Time over. We made it.  My baby is a Margikarp and I regret nothing. Sleep. Cheers. Epilogue I didn’t get to play all of the games, but the ones I did left great impressions. I do find it fascinating how there were more games starring birds and fish than snakes. Streams was deceptively simple looking game, and the fact that it was also the winner of Most Fun game was telling. I can see many screen caps over this game later on. Soulmate: Search, Breed, Repeat was more conceptual at this stage, but it was also one of the most visually stylish games I’ve seen. Seasonal Sci-Flies was a flash based versus game. It happened with Andrew Hussie, and it happened there – despite of the time constrains, within three seconds of picking it up I just knew that the artist behind it was several calibres above me. Even taking away how much I enjoyed the speedy collect-brawl it was, it was worthwhile just for the art. Winner of the Best Surprise game. >Purgatory required two players, being a versus game. The screen was split into a heaven and hell level, in which an angel and Grim Reaper shoot projectiles against each other until the opponent’s health was depleted, and while the opponent was transported to Purgatory the winning party could deliver the final fatality. The night of “PURGATORY” repeats? Totally worth it. Omelette Boris was the grand winner of the jam, and I can see exactly why. It is gorgeous with perky music, and seventeen (!) levels of well-polished puzzles. It even had clear as cling wrap tutorial levels. It was more complete than half of the shipped-but-needing-DLC-add-ons games out there. It’s also about chicken and eggs. That alone deserved something. Milk Blisters was the second game made by Harry’s team, as each person in the jam got to fill up a Post-It note which in turn was scanned and turned into a shooter. I was a fish with eyebrows, just to make up for the lack of eyebrows I drew on myself during the 48 hours. The mouthbirth of Mouthbirth, the Credit Game. Hatch was once the Mouthbirth. A simple puzzle on surface, but before I knew it it turned into a compulsive “need to solve the next level” work. Some sharp level designs. They were also the winners of the Best Team, as they both existed as a single mega-team and four minor sub-teams, seamless like those robots transformed by having multiple robots attaching onto it. Or Captain Planet. Harmonize was just so damn pretty. It involved collecting coloured gems on a sphere, then trying to lock down several correlated coloured rings that moved in different axises over the sphere. It was another meditation game for me, one that required a bit playing to “get” but once it did happen I could see myself being drawn to for hours. Faia was one of the phoenix starred game, in which the goal was to find the next patch of plant growth to combust before it faded away. Here’s the catch – more than one person would be controlling the phoenix and neither party knew it. I could see this game work in an Omegle type of connection, in which the players had to work together without being able to communicate. Burn reminded me of a combination of Audiosurf and Wipeout. The player took control of a phoenix soaring over a circular path, and each fire drum it picked up powered up the phoenix more; likewise, each water drum or obstacle it hit slowed it down. The audio was layered drums that appeared and disappeared depending on the speed of the phoenix. With a headphone on, it was meditating on command. A well deserved winner for Best Sound. We won the Best Art! Unbelievably honoured, and quite surprised by it. The calibre of art there was incredible.
Whirlstrom is likely to get refined, Ouroboroused its way into a complete game eventually. We might even retain its name. Maybe. Either way, biased as I may be I still think I had major luck spin with the team I found. Best team ever. That was hell of a way of spending 48 hours, and I’m putting my name in for next year already. I mean come on, the bar had trees in it, just like Balamb Garden!  It's all trees, but without getting rained on. I'm cool with that. |
Pingback: Global Game Jam 2012 Melbourne – game making in 48 hours with 107 brains, 107 potential zombies. | Nightmare Mode