Saturday night at 5 we arose from our jamming and took a brief walk in the now very summery weather. Our destination: barbecue! We found a nice big park and set up shop with burgers and bratwurst. We spend a good few hours enjoying the sunny afternoon before some people started heading back to work in the labs.
Sunday was the last day of the jam, with work officially to cease at 3pm. My task at the moment was to integrate the UI for the game end screen, showing the scores and player names. The coders meanwhile were scrambling to clean up bugs. By the time of the presentation, our game unfortunately did not have it’s core mechanic implemented. It did, however, feature working networked multiplayer between 4 computers.
Post Mortem: Strike Counter was kinda doomed from the start. Not to fail, but to not get very far. I was impressed by how my team was able to get networking up, but the time and energy spent on this one feature left little room to integrate any of the interesting design ideas that inspired the game.
After every team’s presentation and respective critiques, we posed for a big group photo. We were told this photo would go on the fill the last empty spot in the university’s hall of fame, so I guess I’m a little honored. The rest of the day was left to us, and I had one last castle to get to.
Schloß Neuhaus is a really pretty castle surrounded by the same peaceful river that flows through Paderborn. It apparently functions today as a high school. Sunday, however, was right in the midst of Schützenfest, a lively holiday in which certain townspeople are crowned royalty for a year. That night, the kings and queens of the last year had their final celebration in their finest clothing as the whole town gathered for festivities. I helped myself to some ice cream and finally tried out currywurst before heading back through a scenic wooded area right on the water.
We also had one last dinner with some of our good friends who wouldn’t be joining us in Frankfurt. The place we chose sold a 40 euro burger that can apparently get you in another hall of fame, but we decided to save it for next time.
My Game!Castle Number 3 (For Me)Finally tried that good stuff
It was a very emotional day for me because I had to say goodbye to MY best friends Christina and Tobi.
I forgot that Sunday had a different bus schedule so I missed my stop and had to walk back to campus. It was HOT. My team completed the game a day before so we were just fixing some minor bugs and waiting for the presentation. In my last blog, I briefly talked about what I worked on the project and I will discuss the details below.
First of all, I created a method for the protagonist’s movement which the protagonist walks to wherever my cursor clicks. Secondly, I wrote a script for the camera to follow the player. Initially, I had the camera as a child of the Game Object Player, however, I changed it later so that the camera could stay inside the scope. During the second GameJam day, I encountered the problem that my player could walk out of the background, yet the camera follows it. It should not be difficult to fix it but I didn’t know how to scale an orthographic camera nicely. It either stayed stationary or cut off some of the backgrounds, like I couldn’t freely resize the camera. The problem got solved in the end tho!!! Afterward, I worked on some animations when events were tricked. For example, after the protagonist completes a dialog with the hover dog in the game, the hover dog takes our player outside and moves out of the screen. In the end, when I had some extra time, I developed a menu screen and an options screen for the game. In the options screen, the volume gets adjusted by using an audio mixer which was my first time using it. I was confused for a while about how to hook up the sound with my audio mixer until Phil showed me the way.
We received some feedback at presentation; some people appreciated the humor in the game, yet some think we could develop more to the story and the idea of timeline. The most impressive game from this GameJam was beat the boss due to completion. It’s a game where four players with different skills team up to fight a super difficult boss in an area. I was amazed by how much they completed in 3 days due to art, coding, game play and so on. In my opinion, muti-player 2D platform game Soshi Shinobi has the most potential for publishing.
my gameBeat the Boss
At the end of gamejam, we took a group picture together to fill the last spot on Wall of Fame. Second part of the day was free time, and I decided to hang out with my buddies one last time.
Tobi drove us to his house in a sexy convertible. Since German highway doesn’t have speed limit, I kindly asked him to speed up a little bit while Sam made him race (ik he’s bad). Schloß Neuhaus is a castle that’s surrounded by a beautiful garden and a river that goes through the town. Nowadays, Schloß Neuhaus is no longer a castle, in fact, Christina and Tobi went to high school there. We were lucky enough to witness Schützenfest where townspeople gather around to celebrate the new royalty for the upcoming year. As Christina told me, it’s usually the rich people who get selected for crowns. The four of us shared a currywurst together, add on to my German food experience.
Feeling rich in a convertible I miss them Currywurst
Funny part of the story was that I thought Christina could not join us for dinner so I had a really emotional goodbye with her, while they were invited to dinner. So I had burger with her 20 min later. The place had a 40 euro, 5 patties burger that can get you into wall of fame in the restaurant, which I decided to stay as far away as possible. After dinner, we tried to get ice cream but nothing was open since it was Sunday. Instead, we just walked around the town for the last time and chilled in the park.
Another day of the game jam, another round of stubbing out code and making small changes. This time, I made the fireball and crossbow essentially work as intended, and left the grappling hook ability to another coder.
The crossbow fires a single bolt normally, three bolts when charged once, and five bolts when charged twice. The fireball is very similar, but it fires a pathetically small fireball with no charge, a bigger one with one charge, and a very large one with two charges. The cooldowns, speeds, and a bunch of other things were yet to be implemented / balanced. That was the game design team’s job, or at least, that was my impression. Referring to myself as an “Intern” in the first game jam blog post really couldn’t describe my situation better. I do things, but do those things get implemented / matter? Maybe.
Today, however, there was an event, so I actually have more things to talk about! We held a barbecue out in a glade somewhere I can’t exactly name, since I was graciously driven there and back by my German peers.
I had a hamburger of sorts, with a steak (I think?) as the “burger,” a piece of bread I had to cut myself, and some special burger sauce. It was surprisingly good. Steak being my favorite food probably helped. I didn’t take a picture of it, because I didn’t think to, but I did take a picture of the strawberries.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen strawberries this red and healthy looking. They tasted good, too. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen / eaten strawberries in general, actually…
Besides eating, all I really did was wander around aimlessly and talk to some people. Alex went full Minecraft, made himself a small stone axe and defiled mother nature with his creation, so there’s that.
You show that tree, Alex.
Though I intended to work some more upon getting back, it being 8:30PM already—compounded the thoroughly uncomfortable heat of the game lab—convinced me to head back “early.”
It’s so bright out, even though this picture was taken at 9:00PM.
Friday was more jam time! I continued the work on our game’s Heads Up Display (or HUD, for the cool kids). Our 3D artist completed the models for all of the weapons, and our designer was hard at work blocking out levels.
Despite all the sugar in my Fritz-Spritz, I was feeling pretty exhausted by mid-afternoon. I checked in once more with my team before checking out for the day. On my winding journey back to the hotel for a nap, I stopped in an odd shop that appeared to sell only three things: cosmetic lotions, wooden figurines, and candles for baptisms and communions. I was mainly interested in grabbing a souvenir (I’ll let you guess what kind), but what I found was a nice conversation with the shop owner. He has apparently been in this little store for fifty years, and he takes pride in the tourists that he has met from all around the globe.
At 9pm I realized that I hadn’t really eaten in a while. It was hard to believe that it had gotten so late, as the sun had barely seemed to go down. A few days earlier, I had been recommended a doner place (doner, or “döner,” is very popular in Germany), so I took a late night stroll to get my kebab fix. Paderborn is very beautiful in the late evening, with seemingly the whole town eating outside at cafes if not sitting in the park by the water.
Even though we met up at a reasonable time 10:45 am, I was still tired in the morning…… (like usual) We took a train to a non-existing city Bielefeld, where Sparrenburg castle is located. On the way to the restaurant, we past two McDonalds and a carnival.
Garlic Pasta with a coffee
After lunch, we walked up a hundred hills to the castle. The weather was beautiful and so was the view. Our tour guide gave us a brief introduction about the fortress in German and I totally understood it… Very nice of Volker to translate everything for us. Followed by, we traveled through some underground tunnels and visited several dark rooms including a jail. We finished our short visit by climbing the tower and the view on top was absolutely breathtaking.
Welcome to my house
Best part of the day was ice cream. Sam kept selling this ice cream to us that the whole group was very pumped to try out Spaghetti ice cream. The flavor is the same but the ice cream was formed in the shape of Spaghetti noodles. I also accompanied my ice cream with a cup of coffee. The weird Germans serve hot coffee in a glass with a straw… I burned my mouth….
Not my ice cream, the picture is stolen from Patrick
Wednesday took us on an excursion to nearby Bielefeld. Our main attraction: a castle! A few of us took Switches for the ride, so we easily passed the time with some Smash Bros. Coming in the station, we were met with lovely weather, and we walked through a lively street fair on the way to the castle.
Sparrenburg castle sits on top a high peak, and it’s tower reaches even higher. Needless to say, we got quite the workout. Our tour guide led us around the exterior with details about the fortress’s long history, followed by a dive into the catacombs. Under the castle, we trekked through tunnels and explored several dark stone rooms. After the tour, we climbed the central tower and enjoyed a great view of the surrounding area.
In our few days in Paderborn, I managed to get people excited to try “Spaghetti Ice Cream,” a treat I learned about long ago in my German class. Our local friends helped track down the best ice cream cafe in Bielefeld for us to enjoy it properly. The treat itself is traditionally just vanilla ice cream, pressed into the shape of noodles, with fruit sauce and white chocolate imitating tomato and parmesan. This particular cafe had four whole pages of their menu dedicated to different varieties, and everyone ate well.
The Castle Tower!The view from up topThe Main Course
The second day started too early for me… I was half awake for the museum.
In the morning, we went to Heinz Nixdorf Museum which is donated by Nixdorf(surprise!). The museum combines both old historical machines and some new technolgoies. I was very impressed by a lot of the old chunky computers that you had to manually switch inputs. The high teched robots are attractive as well.
After our trip to the museum, we headed back to the campus for an AI talk. In my opinion, AI is the future for all humans and the question is how would AI work in the gaming industry? Right now, most of the AIs that exist in games are weak AIs, they only work for one specific task and they are based on finite state machines. I think strategy games would be a good start for AI in games.
In the afternoon, I took a nice nap until it was time for board games!!!!! I hung out with the German students and tried out a bunch of board games I never tried. Firstly, I played a game called Circus, it’s a toy building game with some strategies. Basically, you earn points by finishing different constructions, bonus is available if you complete certain tasks. I enjoyed my second board game quite a lot, everyone competes individually, yet you have to collaborate with your neighbors to get points. You map a city with your neighbor and certain combos can earn you points, such as adjacent malls. I was tied for second place in the end. Some of the Germans tried to make us stay by offering wine and beer. LOL.
Today we woke up at a more reasonable hour. We met up with Volker
and bused it over to the Nixdorf museum. It was a really cool museum dedicated
to computers, calculators, counting machines, and robots. We got a nice,
somewhat quick tour of some pre-industrial counting machines and early
computers. Afterward we bused it back over to campus where we got to sit in on
a class on A.I which was mindbogglingly interesting. I loved the topic and learned
a lot about Basic A.I trees, coding behavior and Neural Nets. It only furthered
my budding interest in learning some code. Plus, I feel like I participated
well. We then grabbed lunch in the Café and headed back to the hotel for a
quick siesta before game night.
Rather than taking the bus we decided to walk to campus this
time to learn the route. It was nice day out and only about a mile walk. When
we got to campus, we started game night. I got to play more Q and get to know
more of the Germans in a couple games of Secret Hitler. We ordered some pizzas
for dinner and Amanda and I bused it home to prep to go out. Mike, Amanda, and
I went out for drinks and hopped a few bars before meeting up with Penny and
Josh. We told a couple riveting tales before heading home to pass out.
We spent our time in the morning resting / freshening up before we headed out at 10:45 to catch a train to Bielefeld. Maybe I’m just not paying attention to the scenery at home, but it feels like Germany is much greener. Being that green is my favorite color, I appreciate it.
The view out the train to Bielefeld’s window. I find that pretty clouds like this often spur me to take pictures.
When we got to Bielefeld, we found ourselves in the middle of a carnival. There were all kinds of typical carnival sights to see, like ferris wheels, spinning contraptions I usually refer to as “X-Treme Merry Go Rounds” (I don’t know what they’re actually called), and numerous places to eat food of all sorts. Nothing much struck me except a hot dog stand with american flag designs all over it (which I regrettably didn’t take a picture of) and a neat drink stand of sorts with a medieval, high-fantasy motif.
Beerenweine, a fantasy themed beverage stand, presumably alcoholic by the name. They’re evidently well stocked on potions.
But we had no time to dabble in the carnival. (That’s a lie, but just go with it.) We had a castle to siege—The Sparrenburg, Bielefeld’s landmark—and a big hill to climb. I’m no stranger to walking up hills, and it was no less difficult walking up this one than any other respectable hill. I must have gotten stronger since my summer camp days, though, because I wasn’t completely knocked-the-hell-out by the time we got to the top. I was, however, tired enough to stop and admire the castle from the outside.
Just outside The Sparrenburg, before the bridge to the front entrance.
And so, we breached the castle walls by walking into the wide open front entrance. It was completely serene inside, and awoke my usually dormant desire to wander and look at things. Look at things I did, and many a picture did I take.
Map of The Sparrenburg, from www.sparrenburg.info.Map of The Sparrenburg, but in English.
Just outside The Sparrenberg’s entrance, to the right.
On top of Schuster Bastion.
The courtyard / visitor center, just inside the inner walls.
The view from St Mary’s Bastion.
The view of the bridge to the front entrance, from St Mary’s Bastion.
Looking up at the central tower from behind.
Inside the courtyard, looking out to the right.
A statue of Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg. Lighting is hard.
Then we started our tour, the guide unsuspecting of our scheme to take over the castle. We first looked at a very old well not too far behind the central tower, originally 60 meters deep if I recall correctly (partially filled with debris from hostile occupation and time). After some more looking around the edge of the inner walls, we descended into the catacombs, which dated back to the 1600s.
The living quarters of the soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War, and likely other times. Complete with a large oven, very little light, and a cannon or two. (The original cannon[s] are no longer here.) Looking up and out of one of the openings in the catacombs. The alcove on the right was used to store logs, tar, and soldier residue to dump on foolish invaders.
Unfortunately, it was here the guide got wise on our plans, and put us in the soldier’s disciplinary prison, a fairly small featureless room with a lumpy floor and no light besides an electric light installed on the wall in the modern day (which was operated by a switch outside and out of reach, might I add!).
We were promptly let out because I’ve been lying to you all this time, we were never actually sieging anything, as far as you know. Emerging out of the impressively cold catacombs (so cold you could see your breath!) and into the sun once again, we made our way to climb the central tower. After our gracious hosts paid for everyone’s access, we made our way to the central tower’s entrance, but not before I took a picture of some flowers.
Miscellaneous flowers to the right of the old well. You can see it on the right edge. Why didn’t I take a picture of it?
The climb to the top of the central tower, as to be expected for a 37 meter tall tower, was a long one, with three different flavors of staircase; metal, wooden, and metal spiral.
One of the central tower’s staircases.
Getting to the top however, was worth it; from there, we had a view of all of Bielefeld, just as the brochure boasts.
Looking down on the courtyard from the central tower.
Misc. scenery from atop the central tower.
The flag atop the central tower.A picture of the sky from atop the central tower.
After coming down from the tower and leaving The Sparrenburg, we went on a quest for the fabled “spaghetti ice-cream,” something I initially thought was going to be spaghetti noodles hanging off a vanilla ice-cream cone. I was wrong, but not disappointed.
A menu displaying various Spaghetti Ice Creams. I ordered the Spaghetti-Tris di Pasta, despite my carbonara affinity. (It looks like there’s nuts in the carbonara one.)My order of Spaghetti-Tris di Pasta, chocolate, fudge, and chocolate. I forgot to ask for no nuts, so the left heap went uneaten. (I was full anyway. It’s a lot of ice cream!)
We intended to go out to a bar after returning to Paderborn by train, but most of us didn’t feel up to it, including me. An eventful day, and one that went by quickly, even despite all the walking.
We started off the first proper day of the trip strong with a trip to Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, a museum of old and new technologies ranging from cuneiform tablets to VR headsets.
Heinz Nixdorf from the outside.
The entrance to Heinz Nixdorf.
A neat statue in the Heinz Nixdorf lobby.
I feel like a lot of the more historical exhibitions went over my head, but I could at least appreciate them. We got to see some very old machines, but few of them were ugly or clunky looking; quite the opposite, really. So it’s only natural that I would forget to take pictures of the pretty ones and only have the mind to take a picture of this really old apple brick and some vintage computer mice.
The Lisa I, an old Apple PC.
An array of old and odd computer mice.
There were also some very unsettling robots, prime examples of the Uncanny Valley.
A robot I don’t remember the name of. Its eyes seem to follow you.This robot is frightening and I don’t like looking at it, so I naturally took a video. Feel my pain.
Afterwords, Jörg talked to us about AI, its role in games, and the potential role of games in AI. Since the event afterward was canceled due to rain, I stayed in GamesLab, and almost purely by accident played Q, a game by one of our german hosts, for more than three hours. I got all of the collectibles, though, so it was obviously worth it.
One of the gameplay images used on Q’s steam page. Finding said steam page wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it’d be.
Finally, to end the day off, we played some board games and Jackbox games. A good time was had by all, except Stefan, who was dropped into a pit of spikes via trap-door.
