Global Game Jam 2014

So it was the global game jam this weekend and me and a few friends decided to team up and make a game over the 48 hours. The theme this year was the quote "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." 

From this we decided to make a first person tower defence game; you protect the gate to the town of Woodbury but you can't tell your enemies from your friends! Shine a light on them to reveal their true nature then take them out with your kick-ass crossbow! 

If you would like to play the game you can download a copy from the global game jam website or check out the video below.

You can also check out what the rest of the team have been up to as well.

Scott Ranken - Programmer
Leigh Norton - Programmer
Michael Norton - Programmer 

Global Game Jam: Day 2 and 3

Day 1 blog - CLICK HERE!

Okay so technically this is the end of day 3 just now as i never had time to finish this last night so i am just going to put both posts into one. it may be a bit long but you are awesome if you read it to the end! if not here is the game!CLICK ME!

Day 2: We got off to a good start on day 2 we started nice and early in the morning feeling refreshed after some well needed sleep. We spent the majority of the morning and afternoon finishing the sprites and adding them into GameMaker and creating the basic objects that we needed for the game to have some sort of playability.

The a-MAZE-ing Caterpillar level design

After this we began to design the levels. We decided on 5 levels each with a different art style and set on a different part of the environment. we decided upon forest, jungle, desert and beach as the settings we would have.

Once we had some food we began creating the maps! this took us late into the evening but we eventually had all of our levels completed with all our enemies, collectable objects and gates placed and a quick test of each one to make sure they were achievable and to test for bugs to be sorted in the morning then onto day 3.

Day 3: Our time limit to finish development was 3pm this gave us a limited amount of time to complete our game. At this point we still needed to make the side scrolling part of our game and find and add in sounds this pretty much took us until 3pm which left us with no time to test the game out properly so since we have put the game live on the global game jam website we have found a lot of bugs. However we plan on working on these over the next week or so and will add the update versions to the global game jam website as well.

So what are you waiting for? follow this link and go download our game! lots of feedback will be welcomed with hugs!

thanks for reading!
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The a-MAZE-ing Caterpillar

Download Game-http://archive.globalgamejam.org/2012/maze-ing-caterpillar (bottom of page)

Feeling lonely, suicidal? I know I am but before you reload the gun and write your last will telling your wife she should never have had that affair, give The a-MAZE-ing Caterpillar a try. You will be puzzled long enough to keep you alive for another 10-15 minutes and you can hunt down your true love; unlike your wife.

You are a lonely caterpillar on the search for a life partner. As you travel across the world in search for her you will encouter great dangers. Avoid the nasty bugs and reach the door to the next world to find your mate and eventually save her from the evil Phoenix! Keep going until you become too tired, everytime you save your love you will create a new life in the form of your son who you must guide on his quest for his life partner!

Controls:
<Arrow keys> Movement (Maze Levels)
<Space Bar> Fly (Side-scroll levels)

Points:
Apples - 10 points
Leaves - 10 points
Diamond - 100 points
Completed Level - 100 points
Heart - 1 Life

Hints:
n-next level
r-restart room

Screen Shots

Global Game Jam 2012: Day 1

Well day one is over and so far all seems to be going well. We have our team, an idea and have made good progress so far with everything we are planning on doing so i am pretty happy.

So what have we done?

well we went to the keynote at 3:30pm today where we got given our theme which was this picture.

That was it no words, no meaning. Nothing. Just a picture. Just that picture...

everyone then had 20 minutes to come with an idea that they had to present to everyone that was at the keynote.

Our team interpreted the picture as meaning the circle of life, from this we came up with the idea of a maze/side scrolling game were you have to complete a puzzle/maze before you are launched to another maze through a small mini game were you have to "fly" and collect power ups and health which will help you on the next island and set of mazes.

There were a lot of good ideas that were produced in the 20min session especially "Ghostronaught" which sounded fantastic and i hope the people making it can produce something good and i wish them the best of luck!

After this we started to flesh out our idea a little more. It has now developed into a game were you play as a caterpillar who is on the hunt for  a mate and your objective is to complete the mazes and chase your mate across them until you catch her and produce a little baby before you both transform into beautiful butterfly's and take off leaving your spawn to complete the same missions and find his/her mate.

So far all is going well, we have chosen to make the game 2d and use GameMaker so we don't have to worry about too much programming and can hopefully have at least a few playable levels at the end of it to show off on Sunday.

At the end of day one we have the majority of our art and animation assets so tomorrow shall be spent sticking them all into GameMaker and coming up with the levels!

also this may be a little cheeky but we could do with someone who can make little animations for our start and end screens so if you are interested email me at 10004794@napier.ac.uk and we will give you all the details. and of course you will be credit for all your work.

so it is now 11:38pm and day one is over time for some sleep and then same again tomorrow!

Edited to add
Day 2 and three - CLICK HERE
The Game! - CLICK HERE

thanks for reading!
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I made some Games

After putting off doing any work the whole of the Christmas holidays i decided that with one week left before i go back to uni i should really do some work and stop playing Skyrim so much. So i decided to make a game...

To make the games i used a wonderful program called GameMaker which is free to download from here.

GameMaker takes away a lot of the work from making games and is great for putting together little prototypes of ideas you may have without having to spend hours programming and debugging to find out that it was a pretty rubbish idea you had in the first place.

This was my first time using GameMaker and the reason i decided to use it is that on the 27th-29th of January it is the Global Game Jam which me and a few friends are taking part in. So for this we need something which is quick and fairly simple to use as we only have 48 hours to make a playable game and with our lack of experience there is just no way we could realistically program something in that amount of time.

So the game! well all i really done was follow the first tutorial and then add my own little touches to it. So this is what i done.

I suck at coming up with names for things so this got called "Catch the Clown And Craig's Face For Bonus Points" well it does explain what it is...

The main aim of the game is to score as many points as you can by clicking on a clowns face which moves across the screen. On its own it is pretty boring so to make things a little more exciting i added in some monsters! These little monsters pop up every 3-8 seconds and if you click on them you lose those points you worked so hard to get! (well not really your just clicking the mouse...) 

Every 10 seconds my face pops up and you have to try and catch it and if you do you will get 100 points! but be quick it only stays around for a few seconds before it disappears! 

After the 60 seconds are up it is time to see how well you done. did you make number one in the leader boards or were you rubbish and couldn't even make the top 10?

For a game that only took about 2 hours to make I'm actually pretty happy with it but in all honestly it does suck. However you can't get better at making games without making a few horribly bad ones at some point so keep watching this space and hopefully the next few i make are better than this.

I will do my best to keep this up to date with all the news from the game jam and i will be posting on twitter as well about how our team is getting on so if you are interested follow the blog or hit me up on twitter or one of the links below. 

thanks for reading!
Gamertag: craigmcmillan01
Twitter: craigmcmillan01
steam: craigmcmillan01
add or follow and we can game!