Global Game Jam 2010 (Part 1)

[Possessed: The Turing Deception]

This was our team’s game! It was a lot of work but a lot of fun as always. Here is my team as well as the progress log for our game 😊

Team

• Nick Darnell
• Scott Jacobs
• Harrison Moore
• Michael Noland
• Alex Park
• Nolan Walker

Progress Log

Michael Noland provided the perspective on our progress log, and was nice enough to let me post it here along with the pictures I took of the event.

Friday

4:30 PM Friday

Everyone arrives and begins to setup their equipment.  All the students have awesome hardware, all the professionals have crap machines…

5 PM Friday

Kicked things off, watched the keynote, etc…

People loosely grouped into four circles and discussed ideas. These were collected and put on the projector. Each one got an elevator pitch and we voted on interesting ones (you could vote for any you thought were interesting). After they were sorted, we went down the list and asked if there was anyone who would champion (form the seed of a team) each idea. Then people started congregating into teams, which ended up being surprisingly geographic (based on the original sitting positions).

Because of the snow, all we did on site was some initial planning and brainstorming, as well as exchanging contact info.

8 PM Friday

Dinner at Los Tres Magueyes, talked some more about the jam game as well as Pinin Rodizo, as Mike D and Mike Lee joined us.

10 PM Friday

Got a mailing list set up and started working, using Steam as our chat/IM system (half had AIM, half had MSN, but everyone had Steam).

1:32 AM Saturday morning

Got the game registered on the GGJ website.  Here was our progress at the end of the first night before everyone went to bed.

Saturday

9:00 AM Saturday

Woke up to a ton of snow on the ground and no chance of Icarus opening their doors again early for the jam. So we all log onto steam to coordinate our actions.

12:00 PM Saturday

Music is in place. Some motion blur to add visual appeal.

1:20 PM Saturday

Progress after the first draft of the gameplay mechanics are working. Updated sprite artwork.

2:25 PM Saturday

What a difference a background makes, gameplay improvements.  Bloom has also been added to make artwork pop a bit more.

4:05 PM Saturday

New art, some of the LAN netcode is in place.

6:39 PM Saturday

Got a call from someone at Icarus. They won’t be opening the venue tomorrow either. Guess this is going to be a totally virtual jam.

7:25 PM Saturday

Might look dinky, but this is the point where we have a full menu system including server browsing!

10:16 PM Saturday

The lobby now has windows login names instead of just IP addresses, both local and remote connections are working. First real pass at state replication is in, but it has some issues (the two quickly diverge). Attack animations and menu sounds are in.

11:20 PM Saturday

It works!!! Client and server are properly replicating to each other. All of the blind-written attack player code is actually working! You can finally have a positive score.

1:00 AM Sunday

Added back button to menus, etc… New title screen logo part done. Everyone is wiped out, time to sleep.

Sunday

The final day. It should be interesting.

9:58 AM Sunday

Nolan consolidated the replication messages with the tick messages so we send half as many packets. We have a 3 player match that’s noticeably faster than last night, starting to see glimmers of fun!

11:48 AM Sunday

End game timer and score board added.

1:27 PM Sunday

Ocean background, first pass at a mote particle system.

2:25 PM Sunday

Got in an AI player that is amazingly stupid, so single-player works now.

3:00 PM Sunday

Here’s what the title screen looks like now, showing off the mote particles. The energy cores are in and working.

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3:30 PM Sun day

Checked in fix for last known issue with resetting. Time for final play testing.