Finnish Game Jam 2013

Back home after a fun weekend at the FGJ Oulu. This was our first game Jam and I'll write a few notes about the event here.

I have been hearing about the gamejams from my friends for a couple of years now and was quite hesitant to go actually. Situation where you got a bunch of people you don't know trying to come up with an idea in half an hour and actually getting stuff done in two days didn't feel very attractive. My normal mode of operation is coding alone in a dark room without too many distractions, I thought if there are people around, It would be impossible to get anything done. Plus I have my memories from early 90's atari demoscene gatherings where people were drinking and KLF was played on High Volume and it was all very festive =)

Anyway I made a last-minute decision to go and I'm glad that I did. We had a good few people coming to the event, kick off with a few presentations and then the game theme was let out, they played a sample of heartbeats. After that, 30 mins or so to come up with a game idea and pitch it in front of everybody. I went with a vague idea of a game that featured sheep, wolf and Double Rainbows. That kind of thing that might appeal to very young children, be less gamey and more like let's just make these sheep happy and have a strong AWWW.. factor.

pitching the sheep-double rainbow idea

planning on a whiteboard

Let's code like mad hatters!

preparing DeDD decks for playtesters

I was surprised to hear the high level of the pitched ideas that people had, all cooked up in only 30 minutes. I pitched mine and after the pitching, mix and mingle and try to get involved with a project or try to persuade somebody there is a demand for games with sheep, wolf and Double Rainbows. =)

Eventually, the team sheep formed, two Vietnamese guys who had no previous experience about game development joined in and we went thru the details of the game on whiteboard and set to code. I wrote a few skeleton classes for the guys  to start working on. Displaying the graphics turned out a bottleneck, the guys had their mind set on CraftyJS for gfx. We discovered that crafty is very badly documented and a total PITA for first timers. End of the friday night we had nothing on screen, the boys went home and I stayed working on the base classes until late. Lots of coffee was consumed. Picked up my friends from this bar at 2am and went to bed.

First thing in the morning I checked our repo and hey, the guys had managed to harness crafy to display some sprites, great! Back to the venue and more grinding. More trouble with crafty, at 9pm team Vietnam went home and I got looking into EaselJS gfx lib (the guy in the next table recommended using it). Spent around an hour converting the crafty stuff for easel and saw a commit coming, the guys had worked out how to do their thing with crafty. Dropping easel that instant, more coffee and back on track. Eventually I coded until 5:30am and found out I wasn't the only one who had a hard time with crafty. The game was nowhere near complete but I just had to get some sleep before driving home later on sunday. Commit to repo + sleeeepp..

Our sheep game featured pigs eating apples in the end and no Double Rainbows. But it was all good fun, learning new things and getting to know new people. I definitely recommend attending a gameJam if you have the possibility. It's fun to see people being playful, hanging out and producing something out of nothing in a very short time. Don't hesitate to go even if you're not sure how it's going to work out. It's about the travel and not about the destination. Good times.

The pictures in the article are by kind courtesy of Oulu Gamedev Club Stage who organized the event, thanks a bunch guys!

As a side note here's something really ancient. But it's justified so it's all good. =)

Nice snowfall today. Going out to do some snow clearing, yih!