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Today was finally the day: the start of our game jam!!!! However, it didn’t start off very well as Alex, Mike, and I got on the bus and had to get off a few stops later. Apparently, the holiday meant that it wasn’t going the entire route, so we ended up across the street from the train station – a 30 minute walk to campus. We got a taxi at the station and it dropped us off at the other side of campus, which wouldn’t have been a big deal except that we were walled in by buildings and almost all the doors were locked. To add to that, we thought we could just cross the building and end up in the quad, but one of the two doors we needed to go through was locked. I don’t know why, but there were no other open doors in any of the buildings, so what would be an easy walk ended up a stressful wander through three buildings trying to find an exit until we had to double back.

That aside, we arrived at the game lab only a few minutes late and we quickly got started. The theme of “working better together” was announced and we split up into teams of two and then six to decide on game ideas and narrow down the most interesting ones. We ended up going with my idea – a short film idea I had created for a final project a few semesters ago called “Return to Otter Space.” As it implies, an astronaut crashes onto a water planet and befriends an otter to help him rebuild his ship and return to outer (otter) space. I was nervous when we started voting to narrow down game ideas after they were presented, but my game idea managed to make the cut by last place; a few of my teammates seemed glad that it passed through too.

My team is fantastic. The bomb dot com. I’ve never worked on a team of this size, nor have I been able to work just solely on art. Although I consider myself creative I’m not primarily a game designer, so having other students to come up with the ideas and figure out the finer mechanics and ideas was such a relief. And they’re great at it too. We also have four sound designers, which is something completely new to me. Our IGME program doesn’t teach sound, so it’s usually an afterthought and done by whoever has the time to spare. After taking basic sound recording with SOFA, I realized that sound was a really important and overlooked aspect of games. I think with these students dedicating all of the jam to sound effects and music will give our game more of a professional feel that I wouldn’t have gotten at RIT.

Our programmers are fantastic as well. I was excited when Tobias, a student we have been spending time with earlier in the week, joined us as a programmer. I thought getting the otter to follow the player around would be a nearly impossible task to figure out, but he managed to get a really cute and interesting swimming pattern nearly finished in only a few hours. I was feeling tired after modeling a power cell and power dock, but seeing that has reinvigorated me and I’m really excited to get back to work. Everyone is going back to the hotel early, so I will probably join them, but if no one stopped me I think I could work through the entire night because I’m having such a good time. I am so thankful I had the resources and support to go on this trip, and I look forward to the rest of the game jam this weekend.

Alex and I slept through the morning and ended up missing breakfast again. However, that did lead us to a really cute bakery filled with an endless supply of tasty treats. I bought a cheese Danish that tasted more like a heap of frosting on a very small pastry, and I regret not trying more things. We then caught the train to Bielefeld, a city I was informed was often called “the city that doesn’t exist,” (though I’m not sure why, I actually really liked it there!). We meandered through the town and ran into another fair that was setting up for the weekend.

A long hike uphill brought us to the Sparrenburg Castle, Bielfeld’s most notable landmark. It was a really beautiful day and the sun and breeze made it the perfect temperature to walk around outside. We joined a tour but the guide only spoke German so we had only a summary of the tour from translations. We went down into the underground part of the castle where soldiers would spend their time and man the two cannons when the castle was being attacked. It was very cold so it was hard to focus, but the tour guide brought us into a side room where they used to bake bread for all the soldiers there. I enjoyed that part, and it helped me put into perspective how many people fit in that small basement. I wish we had learned more about the seventeen types of bats that made the castle their home; I always enjoy learning about conservation.

After we were done touring the tower, we went back into town because everyone wanted to get ice cream. And not just any ice cream. SPAGHETTI ice cream. It sounds gross, but it’s actually ice cream that’s been pushed through a tool that made it look like strands of spaghetti, complete with jelly sauce and white chocolate as the “parmesan.” I had a vanilla variation, but I actually found it underwhelming (but don’t mention that to the other students). During the dessert we got into a pretty serious discussion about game design and the various problems with it, and getting the perspective from German game design students was very insightful. We decided that students would be more successful if the culture changed to encourage more team work and supporting fellow classmates.

We took the train back to Paderborn and stopped at a grocery store to stock up on supplies before the national holiday the next day. I was surprised at how seriously they took it; no place in town was going to be open, so we had to make sure we didn’t forget anything. I was also pretty shocked to see the number of cigarettes being sold at the checkout. I expected the regular candy and gum like in the states, but as we waited in line we were faced with the disgusting pictures of damaged lungs and rotten teeth they include on the cigarette packages. I was even more surprised at how casually the person in front of us bought a bulk pack without hesitation. The fact that cigarettes are still so common, enough that they still have cigarette dispensers on the streets, is off putting.

The day began with breakfast at the hotel and then a bus ride over to the Nixdorf Computer Museum. We toured the various floors and went through the history of computers and how they started as simple punch card machines. I had learned about all of these early calculators and computers in my Computer Information Technology course, so I was able to ask more in-depth questions and recognize the most important parts of the machines. As we were walked through the development of the first computer and then the earliest video games, I found a lot of it interestingly applicable to what I have learned in both IGME and the film and animation course. Because I love 3D modeling, I was interested in the art aspect of computers and video games. I was reminded of my first advanced 3D modeling assignment last year that involved finding an old, visually interesting object to model; a lot of the primitive machines and computers would have been great ideas. My affinity for hard surface modeling continued to fill up my phone’s gallery as I went through and took pictures of anything that might be a reference or even inspire new projects. And of course, reference images are only as good as your ability to also take orthographic views, so to a non-animator my photos from the day looked pretty tedious and boring. We ended our tour at a wall of Chinese cat statues hooked up to a board in which people could use basic coding syntax to make them turn and wave in various patterns. It’s a great concept, but I also just really like cats.
We then went back to the university for a talk about AI and the role it plays both inside and outside of video games. I had a really good time asking questions and posing ideas to discuss, so much so that we ran out of time and I had to continue the discussions into lunch. After spending more time hanging out and having great discussions with the German students, we returned to the hotel for a brief rest before returning for game night.
I got a little work done on the current model/animation I’m working on – the bell tower from the recent Game of Thrones finale that I wanted to animate in the same style as the opening credits. We had ordered pizza, but mine was more like the contents of a sub dumped onto a cheese pizza with a couple mushrooms added in. I don’t know who eats pizza with lettuce on it, but they need to re-evaluate their life choices.
I joined some of the students in a couple games of Secret Hitler. Yes, I recognize the irony in that one. I had spent an entire summer playing that game with my friends back home, so I was pretty excited to play it again. The German students had obviously played with each other before, so it was pretty funny to see the crazy ways they would deduce who was a fascist and who was a liberal. Some turns took a very long time as they used logic to decide the best way to win; it was clear they were game developers by the way they thought things through. I just called everyone snakes the entire time.
Alex and I decided to leave the games lab to meet our friend Mike back at the hotel. We hadn’t really checked the bus schedule or looked up the way back before we were already outside and without wifi, so it was a 20-minute wait in the cold as we listened to music in a particularly empty part of town. After meeting up with Mike we headed over to a bar that he had looked up called “Black Sheep.” It was pretty empty and after we each had a drink, we realized the bar was closing. So onward we went to find another open bar, a surprisingly hard task for being in Germany. We stopped at “Globtrotters” bar and had drinks and exchanged wild abroad stories until our friends Penny and Josh joined us. I lost track of the number of drinks I had, but I remember that they were all very tasty. We didn’t want to stay out too late because we had to catch an early train in the morning, so once the bar started clearing out we also left to go back to the hotel.