Category: Paderborn

It’s honestly hard to remember what I did the second day of the game jam because most of the work I’ve done has been small or was stubbing code for someone else. After some reviewing the edit logs, I realized Friday was the day I started remapping controls and adding the Shield special. A lot of my time was spent trying to make it easy to edit for balancing purposes and other such things, time that probably could have been spent on other things if our architecture was a bit better. I sure do have a thing for attracting bad architecture, and not realizing it soon enough to call it out.

I have no pictures because we spent all day indoors, even though I personally took a couple breaks to walk outside and get some fresh air.

I didn’t get a wide array of things done, so there’s really not much else to say. I made some players slower when a button is held.

Despite it being a public holiday, In Via was still serving breakfast, though they opened slightly later, at 8:00. (Germans sure do seem to wake up early.) After eating said “late” breakfast and getting prepared, it was time to set out to the university for the game jam. We were running a little late, so Stephen called a cab for himself, me, and some others. It was a large cab, with two rows of back seats, so we were all comfy and got where we needed to be. I still don’t trust the cabs here, not after Michael’s cab story.

First, we split into myriad groups of two, where we’d each come up with an extremely bare-bones pitch or idea, which we would then pitch to two other groups of two who would also pitch their ideas. We’d then combine / adopt ideas as needed and come up with a decent, actual game pitch. Finally, we’d have three votes and give them to our favorites, deciding which ones would be dropped.

I was the one who did the pitch at the front of the room for our group. We had in mind a game temporarily titled “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Warp-Drives,” a poorly executed play on Guy “F L A V O R T O W N” Fieri’s food review TV show. We called it DDWD (Dee-dee-dub-dee) for the very short time we still had the pitch before it was murdered in cold blood by a lack of votes.

The idea was to have splitscreen multiplayer where one player is a waiter, and the other is a chef. The waiter would have to take orders to pass to the chef, clean up spills, deal with rude customers, etc. with the mouse or controller. The chef would take orders from the waiter and make the food accordingly with the keyboard / another controller, then pass it back to the waiter who would finally serve it. I, personally, think it was a good idea that was worth a shot but oh well the votes said otherwise. 🙁

Instead, I was shifted onto another interesting game, Beat the Boss, a boss rush game initially intended to have multiple classes each with an ability that synergies with the others, such as an ice man who freezes people and a fire man that does extra damage if the enemy is frozen. We later down the line decided that was out of scope. The core gameplay remains unchanged, however; the goal of Beat the Boss is to beat the boss (hopefully we’ll even have more than one boss to beat!).

Two players choose from two classes (hopefully four classes, maybe even four players, later down the line if time allows) and charge into an arena to take down a big boss, armed with only a sword, a dash / dodge roll, and a special ability. Players die in one hit, but can be revived by their friends, making each fight a careful balancing act of staying safe, beating the boss, and keeping your friends in the fight should they become deceased.

I don’t feel like I got much done that first day. Most of the time spent was planning out the game, which I did feel I participated in, and waiting for the lab computers to do literally anything. Even when the computers finally finished doing whatever it may have been, due to the early state of the game, it was difficult to test things or visualize what needed to be done. I felt like an intern mixed into the developers of a brand new game.

I did add in a very, very rudimentary basic attack, the sword swipe; on click, a hitbox appears in front of the player, about as long as them, and about twice as wide. It’s got a nice rhythm to it, last I checked, but I can’t tell if the rest of my team is headed down the “press the button in rhythm” route like I am or the “RAPIDLY SLAM THE BUTTON TO SWING AT SUPER SONIC SPEEDS” route. This was largely possible due to Ingo’s excellent code stubbing.

I had headed home early due to lack of things to do at the moment, but my team continued to progress, and by the evening, we had movement, rolling, and even an adequate camera that simulated what the game was generally going to look like. Despite the relative lack of technical progress, getting the kinks worked out early is always preferable to getting them worked out later, and breaking everything in the process.

I think the title really says it all, but I guess I owe a more detailed explanation. Today at 10am we started our game jam in collaboration with the University of Paderborn’s Game Lab. Together, the 55 or so of us will be jamming until Sunday evening. And what a slam it’s been already! While I have done Ludum Dare before, that was always from the comfort of my home with a few friends. Here we have a full lab of talented students from a variety of areas of study.

Lucky for us, they really know how to jam here! With impressive efficiency, everyone was sorted into a team based on their skills and interests. We were first divided into pairs to come up with ideas. Next, groups of six were formed out of three pairs. Each of these teams decided on an idea to pitch to the whole lab. Once all of these ideas were pitched, everyone voted to narrow down the selection. Finally, teams were formed around winning ideas, with care to allocate students who excel at art/design/coding/sound in the right places.

Something I found very refreshing was the sheer number of people who didn’t just code. There was an especially large group of sound people, and even quite a few who designed primarily (I’m used to design on small teams being a shared responsibility). I ended up on a team with a very ambitious idea that doesn’t really fit with the games I usually play or make, hoping to learn something new. It might have been a bit more than I bargained for, but I’m having fun implementing UI, something we almost didn’t realize the importance of at first.

Most of the day was spent inside, so I hope you’ll enjoy a page from my notebook:

Today we met up at the University of Paderborn where we split into groups for the Game Jam. There ended up being enough American students for one to be on each of the teams. First, we broke into small groups of 2 to come up with a game pitch. My pitch was the idea of a 2D puzzle platformer in which one player would control two characters on screen, represented by shapes. The player would have to switch back and forth between characters, which vary in size and shape throughout levels; circles, squares, large and small shapes, controlling one at a time to guide them to the exit of each level. If either of the players took damage from an enemy or fell to their death, the player would have to restart the level. Each group then joined together with two other groups of 2, making a total of 6. The students discussed which of their three pitches they would go with, and they ultimately decided on mine. One person from each newly-formed group then wrote their pitches on the whiteboard, with a title and up to 6 short bullet-point descriptions. We narrowed down some of the pitches, and unfortunately mine did not make the cut. Students then decided which pitch they would like to work on, while the faculty would ensure there was an even distribution of programmers, artists, game designers and sound designers on each team. The team I am in is going to work on a 2D puzzle game, in which two players control part of a player. One controls the legs and handles movement, while the other controls the upper body and handles attacking. Players can also switch roles as they please, but will keep using a preset element; fire or water, which not only gives each player a turn to control each half of the body, but adds variety in gameplay. A fire-elemental player controlling the upper body would use fire projectiles, while a water-elemental player controlling the upper body would use close-range melee attacks.

Today we traveled to the small town of Bielefeld, where we took a tour of the Sparrenberg Castle, which was used in the Thirty Years’ War, as well as part of World War II. One of our guides, Volker, was kind enough to translate the tour guide’s sentences to English.

Down here is where enemy soldiers would run up to try to raid the castle. Because of the curved floor, soldiers could easily roll grenades downward to stop them. As our tour guide explained, there were no fragments of grenades found in the walls, which means that the enemy soldiers never got far when invading.

My day started at a little coffee shop(I don’t remember its name anymore). People at the store were old and they were reading newspapers, don’t think they had an intense day going on. After knowing that staring is common in Germany, I don’t frick out no more. And many of them actually tried to talk to me, it’s just that I couldn’t understand them. Also, they sell packaged eggs at the shop which I thought was interesting. The store had a variety of bakeries, I feel like I have to go back to try out more stuff.

After breakfast, we walked around the town a little bit and got to see some historical buildings. Near the bus stop, we got more coffee!!!!!

My first time taking the bus in Paderborn was awkward because I kept pushing the “stop” button until someone yelled at me. (not really, but I was still embarrassed, I’m shy ). After arriving at Paderborn University, we headed up the games lab that is dominated by computer science students. The lab is like ours but smaller which makes sense since they don’t have a game design major. There weren’t many students in the lab, Bernie was working on his side project Q while we arrived.

For the rest of the day, we pretty much just chilled and fought with the game Q, that is made by a group of German students. If you are wondering what the game is like… Think about a mix of GeometryDash and Celeste plus Hallow Knight and Getting Over it. Yes, I gave up after half an hour. It’s not released yet but I’ll buy it just to support my friends. And then make my BFF beat the game for me, pretending I’m good at extreme action games.