Unnatural Selection - Team Asiana's Game Jam Entry

This game came out of our recent 48-hour game jam. It was made by Team Asiana, which included Youhao Wei, Zuoming Shi, Duy Huynh, and Ky Tran. They made the game using GameMaker, and it was interesting that they decided to figure out how to give the game an isometric perspective.

The premise of this game is to control an army of artificially created monsters. The game allows you to select from several different monster parts, and putting them together gives you units with different stats. It's mostly functional aside from the fact that you don't have any enemies to attack (they were removed during the last few minutes before the deadline due to some glitches that couldn't be solved). Despite those problems, this game was perhaps the most well presented, since it featured a menu screen, music, and lots of great artwork.

Click here to play the game.
Click here to download the source files.

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Humans Attack - Team Awesome's Game Jam Entry

This game was made during our recent 48-hour game jam by Team Awesome, which was composed of Hunter Haynes, Rachel Brindle, and Sean Stephens. They started out with a very ambitious game idea: they wanted to make some kind of real-time strategy game with online multiplayer, and the central mechanic was built around allowing players to hack into parts of the game. It was about halfway through the weekend, they realized that their idea was impossible.

When Team Awesome decided to abandon their original game idea, they took an old particle-based system that Sean had worked on sometime ago and turned it into a game about zombies. The premise is that the player controls the waves of zombies (in green) and tries to use them to kill the humans (in blue). They loosely tied it to the game jam's theme ("Artificial") under the idea that zombies are artificial life.

People seemed to generally really like this game, and it was voted second place out of all of the games from the event.

Click here to play the game.
Click here to download the source code.

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Plants vs. Robots - The Red Team's Game Jam Entry

This was the winning game from our recent 48-hour game jam, and it was made by the Red Team, which included Cindy Trieu, Sean Grogg, Livio De La Cruz, and a little help from Joshua Djakaria. During that weekend, this team was pretty inspired by the Studio Ghibli films that they had watched recently, and they were even listening to the films' soundtracks while working on this game.

The main mechanic of this game is the ability to grow vines by clicking and dragging on them. Both the character and vine animations received a lot of praise, even though the rest of the game was relatively unpolished and had many glitches.

The funny thing about this game is that it's almost completely contradictory to the game jam's theme, which was "Artificial". If it wasn't for the one robot in the game (which was literally added in the last 20 minutes of the game jam), then the game technically wouldn't have qualified.

Click here to play the game.
Click here to download the source code.

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Photos and Stories from the Fall 2013 Game Jam

This semester's game jam was pretty awesome! We had 13 participants, and we made four games in 48 hours. Most of the returning participants agree that this game jam was a lot more fun than last semester's, and we were able to make four games in 48 hours.

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Freely Available Assets from Game Jam 2013

The artists participating in our Game Jam a week ago has allowed the club to release assets they produced during the Game Jam for free!

Get them here!

We would appreciate it if you cite Cindy Trieu for the CindyAssets pack, and cite Ky Tran if you use the KyAssets pack.

Since the premise of the game that the KyAssets pack is based from requires customization in body parts, each creature body comes with a sprite strip of 12 body parts that are already correctly positioned, assuming both the body and parts share the same origin point.

   

Enjoy!

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Game Development Resources

(Sfxr, speedy sfx generator.)

On Monday, we covered a variety of handy resources to use for our upcoming game jam. Here's list of the resourced we covered, highly useful for not only the game jam, but game development in general. All items here are free for most functionality, and are arranged in no specific order save for categories.

Before you jump into exploring these resources, note that 3D-related tools tend to have a much more significant learning curve, so we do not recommend attempting to develop a 3D game during the game jam without significant prior experience.

Update 11/8: added several new tools to our game development list, and categorized our tools into either the Rapid category or the Advanced category.

Game Development
Rapid:
Stencyl - popular 2D game-creation software with visual scripting and integrated physics engine.
Game Maker Studio - speedy game-development tool with extensive community.
Construct 2 - 2D game-development engine.
RPG Maker - popular program for creating JRPG-style games.
Advanced:
LibGDX - Open-Source Java framework for deploying on PC, iOS, HTML5, and Android.
Unity - strong 3D game-creation tool.
Ren'Py - Python-based visual novel creation engine, no prior programming experience necessary.
Pygame - popular Python extension for game creation.
Flash Builder - Fast IDE for flash games, using AS3.
Unreal Development Kit - complete 3D game-development engine. Beware: high learning curve.

Graphic
Rapid:
Tigsource Assemblee Competition Part 1 - graphics for sound assets for public use
GraphicsGale - highly useful and (mostly) free pixel art creation program.
GIMP - standard free open-source program.

Microsoft Paint- don't laugh! Paint is actually a very handy tool for quick edits.
Advanced:
Photoshop CS2 - this old version of Photoshop is now free! Note that Windows 7 needs special support.
Pixen - open-source pixel-art creator for Mac OS X
Blender - free 3D graphics rendering software.

Sound
Rapid:
Audacity - powerful open-source sound-editing program.
Sfxr - instant 8-bit sound effect generator. Check out bfxr for flash version and cfxr for Mac version.
FreeSound - huge database of quality sound effects, under a variety of references.
Incompetech - another database of free sounds.
Advanced:
GarageBand - powerful tracking/SE tool for Mac.
Acid Xpress - free music recording and creation software for Windows.

Misc.
Tiled - map-creation software for tile-based games.
MakeHuman - random 3D human model generator.
PolyCount - community for 3D art creation and game development.
ModDb - community for game modding.

Comment if you have more resources that you think fits on this page, and good luck if you are attending the Game Jam!

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48-Hour Game Jam on November 8th!

photo credit: gamedevhouse.com

The GameDev Club is holding its second game jam during the Veterans' Day weekend! We're hoping that having that Monday off will allow participants to still get homework done after the game jam is finished.

• Starts: Friday, November 8th at 5:00pm
• Ends: Sunday, November 10th at around 7:00pm
• Location: Electrical and Computer Engineering building, room 105 (the IEEE room)

Please RSVP if you think you might come. This is a free event, and there will be free food all weekend!

What is a Game Jam?

A game jam is a super-fun, multi-disciplinary event where teams try to make a video game in only 48 hours. The main purpose of the event is to challenge yourself and gain new skills, so the event is open to everyone, regardless of skill level or experience. The game jam is also a great opportunity for artists and musicians to work on a game project and to see what it can be like to be part of a game development team.

In order to prevent people from starting their games early, every game has to be made around a theme, which is revealed at the start of the game jam. These themes are usually vague and open ended, so you'll have plenty of room to come up with something creative. For instance, the theme for our previous game jam was "evolution."

If you want to get a much better idea of what the game jam is like, click here to read about how our previous game jam went.

Schedule

On Friday, from 4:00pm to 5:00pm, many people will be transporting their computers, monitors, musical instruments, tablets, etc., into the room. If you want to bring anything earlier, please contact Livio at ldelac01@email.arizona.edu.

Then, from 5:00pm to 6:00pm, we're going to have a "social hour." During this time, participants will get a chance to eat some free dinner, talk to other participants, and most importantly, form teams. People also use this time to prepare their workspace so that they can work more closely with their team.

At 6:00pm, the theme is announced and everyone gets to work. This is when the 48-hour countdown begins, so everyone's games will be due on Sunday at 6:00pm.

Most people will go home during the first night so that they can get some sleep, and this is especially convenient for those who live on campus. Others, however, like to bring in sleeping bags and toothbrushes so that they can sleep in the room. We will have multiple officers on duty throughout the entire event so that we can keep an eye on everything and to make sure that nothing gets stolen or damaged.

On Sunday at 6:00pm, everyone will stop working, and everyone will get a chance to look at all of the games that have been made. We'll also start cleaning up and helping everyone get ready to go home. It's also likely that we might all decide to go out to some restaurant together for dinner (the food would not be free in this case).

Tips and Advice

Important: Please put the room's phone number into your phone contacts: (520) 626-7324. If you ever get locked out of the building during the event, you can then call this number and we will send someone to let you in. We will likely have poor cellphone reception throughout the event, since we will be in what is essentially the basement of the ECE building. This is why we insist that you call the room phone because that will be the most reliable. Also, the poor reception will eat away at your phone's battery, so you might want to bring your charger.

You should be able to get free parking in the parking lot next to the ECE building starting at 5:00pm on Friday. Parking on campus is usually free during the weekends, unless there's a big event such as a home football game.

Also, please plan to take a lot of breaks. It's not healthy to sit in front of a computer for more than a few hours at a time, so use this as an excuse to get up, go outside, and get some sun. One of the best things that we did during the last game jam was to have the entire team take breaks together, which made for some great team-bonding moments as we would just spend the break time goofing around and having fun.

And finally, don't get discouraged if you don't have a lot of experience! Usually half of our participants are new to game development, and the game jam is actually a great environment to learn how to build your first game. The constraints of the event will teach you how to focus on the most important parts of your game, and you'll get to more clearly see how your work gets translated into the final product.

Also, don't forget to RSVP!

Questions

If you have any more questions, please ask Zuoming at zuomingshi@email.arizona.edu.

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