Montreal Game Jam 2015: Pwrong

Some of you may have seen that I’ve been participating in a number of 1 hour game jams as of late (held at weekjam.com / #1hgj on AfterNET). They’re super short jams, so there’s not a lot to say about them – I might get around to doing a mass post mortem for them. Maybe. Until then, I am going to look back at a previous jam from earlier in the year and write a bit of a post mortem for it. This time I’m going to talk through my experiences at the 2015 Montreal Global Game Jam, where my team (known as “Not Enough Laptops”) entered for a third year running (this time with an additional programmer).

The Team

Anshul Goyal (Programming)
Sean Noonan (Art and additional design)
Pete Smith (Programming)
Aidan Green (Design and audio)

The Theme

What Do We Do Now?

Here was a theme that filled our minds with possibilities. It almost seemed “too easy”; it was hard not to come up with ideas. However it was not an easy task to decide which of these many ideas we should settle on. It was also when I noticed that we had matured as a group.

This was our third year jamming together and we weren’t as wide eyed, inexperienced or perhaps even as excited as we once were; we basically knew our limits, specialties, and we knew that we could succeed. We weren’t cynical by any means, but the ground felt familiar, and I feel our comforts resulted in an inability to decide on what to make.

Our first night had us pitching, scrawling, debating and scribbling out numerous game ideas; an adventure game of sorts where you wake up alongside a body with the police are banging on your door, a narrative heavy game where you play as a child dealing with the impending divorce of your parents, an isometric prisoner of war escape action game, and a bunch more… but nothing we could all fully agree on.

That is until midnight rolled around and we engaged full panic mode before thinking; what if we go with Pong, and the ball just vanishes? What could we do from there?

Pwrong.

The Jam

In essence, we planned our game as an homage to arcade games roughly spanning the generations; starting with Pong, moving through Pac-Man, switching to Akranoid, then R Type, in to Geometry Wars and finally teasing with a platformer.

Once we had finally decided on a rough concept we took our leave and slept on it some… as well as cramming in some last minute work - for example, I did a couple of colour scheme/interface mock ups, the first of which set the visual direction for the project.

The morning came and went – not that I saw it (I generally don’t rise during daylight on weekends). By the afternoon we realised that we were running behind our planned timeline. We should have had our first playable prototype, but were still not ready. It was around at this point I decided to cut myself off from the team and focus on the art.

I wasn’t used to working at such a high resolution, and the game type was something I’d never built art for. By the evening I’d managed to deliver the bulk of assets – I’d even over delivered by the scope of the game, as we had decided to cut the Geometry Wars game type and severely scale back the platforming section.

We pulled an all-nighter to just get it done. There was a bit of crankiness and we all felt awful, but as the sun rose and we tested the build, it felt worth it.

What went wrong

1. Brainstorm took far too long

As mentioned previously, this really took longer than it should have. I feel like I should shoulder the blame on this one. I personally had a hankering to create something pixel heavy; either something sickeningly cute or fast paced action with lots of explosions and screen shake. I was basically trying to steer all of the brainstorms towards one of these two forms. I simply wasn’t allowing for an organic process.

On top of this I also feel like I may have been on my own in that I was extremely resistant to anything narrative heavy. I wanted to create tight loops with high replayability; score attack, procedural generation, etc.

Basically, I feel my personal agenda got in the way on an early solution during brainstorming. I’ll try to be a little more aware of this in future jams.

2. The game was quite buggy

Though we fixed a bunch of issues post jam, we had a lot of bugs, most likely down to the scope of the game. I’m not sure what we could have done other than shrinking the scope, but with that being our unique feature, as it were, we were resistant to cut any more than we did.

3. Multiplayer only

Same story as with “No Evil”, multiplayer games, especially local, don’t always find an audience. They’re excellent games at the event locations, but once they’re released to the greater public, it’s easy for them to be ignored. Although we were low on time, it might have been preferable to drop the scope of the game a little in order to support solo play.

What went right

1. Two programmers helped with our scope

Our game was a collection of games – the increase in programmer count certainly was one of the driving factors in allowing us to achieve this feat. One of the programmers (Anshul) also wrote a post mortem where he discusses this in more depth – you can read that here.

2. We cut early

We cut the twin stick geometry wars clone early enough for us to continue to have a working flow, and for me to have not spent too much time creating new assets for it (though in the end, I had created most of them anyway).

Realistically it probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to implement the cut twin stick section post jam, but as is the case in most of these group game jams, the project is as it is on the final day, never to be returned to.

3. Tried a different visual style

A very personal positive from the jam – I tried a different style and scale and managed to pull it off. I never work at HD resolutions and always use pixel art as a crutch.

This really highlighted the need for me to start using Illustrator – using raster graphics to fake vectors is a huge time sink, especially when you consider that I have a program as powerful as Illustrator installed on my machine. I have already started learning Illustrator for future work.

The Game

Pwrong was well received, especially in it’s scope – we didn’t “win” anything as such but were name dropped amongst a list of honourable mentions. It was definitely one of the best jam games I’ve been a part of and it set me on a path of exploring vector art for future games.

Pwrong can be played over at GameJolt here: http://gamejolt.com/games/pwrong/45763

Final Words

Over the last couple of years “Not Enough Laptops” have followed up the Global Game Jam with the Ubisoft Game Jam under the name “Titanic Conspiracy”. However, with half of the members leaving Ubisoft and the other half wanting to participate in Ludum Dare instead, we decided to retire the name and sit out of the third Ubisoft jam.

Perhaps this was the final “Not Enough Laptops”/”Titanic Conspiracy” game, but I owe a lot to the various members for the opportunity to make games that I would never have on my own.

Here are the developers I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside in the jams over the last few years:

Aidan Green

I met Aidan at Ubisoft when working alongside him on Watch_Dogs; it was here where he introduced me to Construct 2, as well as the Montreal IGDA demo night. The demo night acted as an inspiring kick up the arse to participate in the global game jam. I strongly recommended anyone reading this to go to one of these IGDA nights in your area, or even travel  if needed. Very inspiring stuff.

In our game jams, Aidan was our primary designer and sometimes audio creator. Though we often had conflicting opinions on where to focus our time on design, I think resulted in richer experiences – with Aidan’s focus on mechanics and mine on details, we created games I don’t think that we’d have been able to create alone.

Aidan left Ubisoft Montreal after shipping Watch_Dogs and a stint on Far Cry 4. He’s now at Eidos Montreal working on Deus Ex - Mankind Divided.

Anshul Goyal

A coding machine, Anshul was another Ubisoft employee. I never had the pleasure to work professionally alongside him, but rather met him through Aidan. Anshul was responsible for the code side of all of our jams.

Seriously, a machine. We couldn’t have done any of our jams without him.

Anshul is still at Ubisoft Montreal.

Scott Morin

Scott and I started Ubisoft on the same day and quickly became design pals, despite his love for Blizzard and World of Warcraft (what a massive nerd).

Scott was present for our Ubisoft Montreal jams and responsible for design and art duties.

Scott left Ubisoft Montreal after shipping Watch_Dogs and now teaches level design at Vancouver Film School. Scott and I are also working on this…

Pete Smith

I met Pete through Aidan just before the 2015 global game jam. I don’t think we’d have been able to finish Pwrong without him. Not only did he bring code, but really solid design feedback.

Pete left Ubisoft Montreal a couple months ago and is now going it alone.

Jean-Sébastien Caron

JS joined us for the 2013 Global Game Jam providing art. There was a wee language barrier at times, but that’s not unusual for game development in Montreal.

I’ve not heard from JS in a while, but a quick Google shows that he’s currently an animator at FAKE Digitial Entertainment. Nice.

David Baron

Indie warrior and fellow level designer on Watch_Dogs, David was present during our first couple of jams, providing design input and feedback.

David left Ubisoft in the later days of Watch_Dogs and is now at Eidos Montreal working on Deus Ex - Mankind Divided.

 

 

Many thanks to you all.

Montreal Game Jam 2014: Bad Mood Rising

I didn’t blog about this at the time, but felt like I should go back and document my 2014 global game jam experience, having participated two years in a row (and get it out of the way before the second Ubisoft Montreal Game Jam begins tomorrow).

The Team

Aidan Green (Design and audio)
Anshul Goyal (Programming)
Sean Noonan (Art and additional design)

The Theme

We don't see things as they are,
we see them as we are.

The Jam

The theme really threw us at first, and we struggled with a couple of weak ideas in our initial brainstorm session. However, it wasn’t long before Aidan piped up with a more personal take on the theme, the gist being…

When someone becomes angry things that would otherwise seem perfectly harmless can be perceived as hostile, and they can lash out at things and people around them.

Once we decided this was to be our take on the theme, we quickly hit the ground running – this would be our third organised game jam together, so we had a good idea where our strengths were; Anshul got his head stuck into the code, Aiden wrote up the design and I worked on a visual style/form proposal.
With our team smaller than last year, we attempted to keep the scope super tight by limiting the number of player actions and the amount of planned content. In retrospect I was probably a little too confident in my ability to nail the style early and use all the time remaining just churning out content – this didn’t exactly go to plan…

The Postmortem

What went wrong

1. Art was a bottleneck

At last year’s game jam we went too far pushing “form follows function”. We did this to the point that we lacked the visual charm that was needed to attract people to play the game/keep playing. I really, really wanted to redeem that this time around, but we didn’t anticipate how much of a bottleneck I would become when it came to asset creation. I took a long time up front planning how the game would look as well as choosing a colour palette, spending my time getting inspirations from some of Dali’s abstract works, but in the end I didn’t have the confidence to deliver anything with that level of creativity in the time we had.
I ended up settling on a muted crate paper look/feel that drew a small amount of inspiration from that initial research.
While I was quick to provide placeholders for environment assets, I was slow on the character and animation front, and I feel this held the game back from my next point…

2. The game was playable late

Just like last year, the game wasn’t playable until the final hours, so we had very little time to playtest. I feel we just lucked out that we had something playable and reasonably fun at all. That said, had we playtested I feel we would have just reduced the amount of time the player was “aggro’d” for and probably reworked some of the enemy paths… basically that would have just been tuning, which to be fair, is a nice situation to be in.
With this being the second year in a row that this point was an issue though, I am going to do everything in my power to get future games playable earlier.

3. My hardware wasn’t suitable

This was a personal issue for me, but developing art on a Microsoft Surface Pro for extended periods is extremely uncomfortable. There’s the small (and low down) screen, reduced keyboard and a not so optimal mouse. This really slowed my progress down and didn’t help with my temperament when dealing with sleep deprivation and general development frustrations. This meant that the majority of my best work was done at home before bed and in the morning before I left to return to the jam location – not an ideal situation.
Next time I will be sure to either use my MacBook or perhaps use the Surface again, but with a USB keyboard and mouse as well as HDMI out to a monitor.

What went right

1. We achieved a (relatively) polished game

Early on we decided to focus on quality over quantity, but kept our plans relatively generous with a lot of “nice to have’s”. When we discovered that art was becoming a slight bottleneck and the game still wasn’t playable, we cut our level content to a quarter of our original plan – something short and sweet was preferable to something long and broken.

It paid off, we had nothing but positive feedback from people at the jam and online as well as the game’s GameJolt page. We even won a judge’s choice award at the end of the jam!

2. We had a full team contribution

It felt like everyone made a really solid contribution to the project, and there was a really good feeling that we’d achieved something by the end. Aidan even put together a bunch of music – something which wasn’t initially planned.
I have referenced the project several times since and it will likely influence how things go ahead at the Ubisoft Game Jam tomorrow.

3. We used social media

Whenever there was a moment of down time I took to Twitter, Facebook and GameJolt (my indie game portal of choice) to talk through development and show work in progress shots. Said media was getting hundreds of views within minutes of being uploaded - it was a real confidence boost and gave us a much needed second wind before the end. Upon release, the game quickly amassed 500 unique plays on GameJolt, which was nice to see.

Never neglect social media…

The Game

"Bad Mood Rising"

Play it here!

Bad Mood Rising was an experimental game for us. It’s a game about how different the world feels when you are angry. We represented this by having the player attempt to make their way through a dangerous environment whilst avoiding obstacles. Said obstacles would take the form of enemies or hazards and would act as the instigators of the player’s anger. If the player collides with an obstacle their rage becomes unbearable and the creatures in the environment would turn hostile. The player would have the chance to defend themselves against the onslaught of incoming hostiles for the duration of their anger, which depleted over time as they calmed down. Only while calm can the player progress through the game.

You can play it in your browser or grab a download over at the link below…

http://gamejolt.com/games/adventure/bad-mood-rising/21627/

Here are a couple of screenshots of the game too…

Wish us luck for the Ubisoft Game Jam tomorrow!

Montreal Game Jam 2013: Day 3

Done!

Download Link (Mac and Windows)

Web Link (Unity Web Player)

• W,A,S,D to move
• E to pick up/drop hearts
• Shift to run

The Montreal Game Jam ended with a 24 hour "crunch". Granted, my personal input was initial paper design and moral support, but still, we were all pretty tired by the end of it.

Our game came together a little earlier than planned. We made some sensible cuts in order to finish with something fully playable. One of our cuts drastically changed the design, and as it happens wasn't even necessary… but anyway, as basic as it was, we had something playable start to finish.
The submitted build of what we called "Hjarta" differs somewhat to our intended design, though primarily the changes were in presentation and aesthetics.

The original design and brainstorm document is available to view here.

I feel I should address what went right and wrong for us at the game jam so maybe anyone reading this can learn from our experiences.

What went wrong

1. Not all of us had laptops

This wasn’t as big of a deal as we initially thought. With David and I focussing purely on game design we were able to come up with some new ideas and nail down existing ones whilst the rest of the team focussed on implementing content. We did briefly do some hands on work remotely to help out, but the team being together in one room really kept the ideas flowing, so that was short-lived. We could have made something a lot more polished had David and I been hands on for the whole project. More people generally means more polish – something I feel we lacked in our end product.

2. We playtested too late

By the time we were all playtesting, there wasn’t really an opportunity to make changes that would benefit the game. As I alluded to earlier, this was exacerbated by the fact that we didn’t find out that we couldn’t achieve the original vision of the game until late into development. One of our big mechanics was also a little late so we didn’t know that it needed a lot more work to reach what we had originally planned for it. This also effected our ability to see what signs and feedback were lacking, quite possibly one of our weakest areas.

3. We went too far pushing “form follows function”

We barely even had a form by the final product. We started out with a simple idea but ended up scrapping it entirely after we switched the design, never to offer a suitable replacement. The original idea had an old man wandering around a dark lonely house with only a small lantern to light his way. The lantern would project light in a small radius around him that matched his heart beat – the faster he moved, the higher his heart rate, and the larger the radius. The house would be inhabited by monsters that the player could see only by their heart beat, emulating the same behaviour of the old man’s lantern. The rest of the house would be in plunged into darkness, only to be revealed by the player’s or patrolling monster’s heart beats. The old man would navigate the environment trying not to cross his light with that of the monsters… this idea was scrapped mid way through development due to technical constraints. We ended up reversing the concept somewhat, having the levels fully visible but the enemies invisible except for their heart beats, an idea we never really gave a form to…

What went right

1. We had realistic goals

We didn’t set out to make something new, unique or crazy in scale, just something that we were likely to achieve in the time we had with the people we had, all the while sticking to the theme and making something that we could enjoy. Even with realistic goals we managed to create a fully working game that was mechanically sound. We even achieved a difficulty curve in our level design as well as managing to offer multiple solutions to complete levels for more skilled players. We had fun playing the game too.

2. We delivered with time to spare

Unlike a lot of groups around us, we were ready for the deadlines and had a first build uploaded as soon as the submission process had begun. We had enough time to test on multiple platforms and adhere to the submission rules then and there. We were also pretty tired by this stage so any more work on the game could have led to mistakes or erroneous decisions.

3. We rolled with the punches

Even after huge technical setbacks and the fact that two of us lacked laptops, we still kept high spirits and rapidly found solutions to every problem we came up against. We worked really well together, I’d work with any of these people again (that’s cheating a little, as I work with most of them already – but in my eyes, this is better than any LinkedIn endorsement).

Should we ever return to this little game to clean it up, I’d like to attempt to put a form to it…

You play as an ex-archaeologist trying to make a quick buck by raiding the tombs of fallen empires. You get a hint that this tomb will be the biggest score yet, however these riches come at a price… the tomb is inhabited by ancient evil spirits that patrol the crypts and hallways.

Using an ancient artefact that you “borrowed” from a local museum, you are able to detect the locations of these ancient spirits.You also learn that these spirits are dangerous but can be evaded if angered by seeking solace in blessed fountains.

Your task is to avoid the ancient spirits and use the hearts of those from fallen empires to pass through gates to get to the final treasure.

As well as a form, there are mechanical improvements I would like to make. If everyone on the team is interested in finishing it off I’d love to give it another try.

See you next game jam!

Montreal Game Jam 2013: Day 2

So the theme was…

…which we interpreted as…

…so now we’re working on something we’re calling “Hjarta”…

…at least some of us are.

Montreal Game Jam 2013: Day 1

Just checking in before I get some shuteye. Today was the opening session of the Montreal Game Jam, part of the 2013 Global Game Jam.

Against all odds we managed to form a small team… unfortunately mainly comprised of people from Ubisoft. Not that this is a bad thing, but I was hoping for a little more random collaboration and chances to meet some new like-minded people. Not for lack of trying, I just found that most people were already in pre-formed groups or had a specific idea they wanted to develop, so were therefore unwilling to work with other designers. A disappointing start, but also a sign of how serious students and people outside of the industry are taking these events. With sponsorship of this particular jam being provided by Warner Brothers Montreal, it’s likely that this is seen as a foot in the door for budding developers – not that I blame people, but with other participants being relatively anonymous, they don’t know who they are “blowing off”.

Anyway, our little band of merry men consists of the following…

• Aidan Green (Design)
• Anshul Goyal (Programming)
• David Baron (Design)
• Jean-Sebastien Caron (Art)
• …and myself, Sean Noonan (Design)

On the design side we’re collating our brainstorm session to support and create a prototype whilst our artist creates concepts so that we can hit the ground running tomorrow.

We rolled a d20 to decide on who has the deciding vote on any conflicts, which resulted in our artist, Jean-Sebastien taking the role as Creative Director.

More tomorrow, for now I sleep…