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.
Thursday marked the beginning of the RIT-Paderborn University Game Jam. Because it was a public holiday (Ascension Day), it started off as a relatively relaxed day with plenty of time to get to the University before the Game Jam started. With that said however, the final handful of minutes before the Jam started turned hectic, as many of the doors around the university were locked. I, as well as a few other students, got utterly and completely lost in a maze of doors, some locked and others unlocked. Despite the obstacles in front of us, we did eventually make it to the Games Lab just in time for the start of the Jam.
When the Game Jam started, we were split into teams of two in order to brainstorm games with the theme “Better Together”. Once that had been done for about 15 minutes, teams were combined into teams of 6 in order to discuss the ideas that people had come up with and decide on a single game to propose. Originally, my partner and I came up with a 2-player maze-puzzle game where the players start in a room together then go down various hallways in order to simultaneously hit levers and complete obstacles in order to advance through the maze. This idea was discussed briefly when we then formed into a team of 6, but we decided to propose a different game that seemed to me like a VR version of Dungeons and Dragons with a single player in VR in the game, and a second player acting as the Dungeon Master from their PC. The PC player would be in charge of spawning in enemies for the VR player and determining what items they get in the game, while the VR player would have to solve puzzles and fight the monsters. I fell in love with this idea, and while it eventually did not make the final cut, as all the teams met and decided on only 6 games despite there being more than 6 teams, I do want to eventually make this game a reality.
After the 6 games to be made had been decided upon, people were then sorted into various development teams for the different games based on their skill-sets. I was chosen to be a coder on a game called A-blob-calypse. Originally I had wanted to be a designer for the game, but because I have a solid coding background and there seemed to be a deficit of coders, I had no issue with filling in the role. Once we were sorted in teams, we began discussing various concepts for the game and how they would be implemented. Unfortunately, I began to feel rather ill midway through the day, and while I did get the chance to contribute to the project to get it started, I ended up heading back to the hotel earlier than I had originally planned so that I could rest up for the next day of development.
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.
The original brainstorm board for Beat the Boss. We have since changed a fair amount, such as it being a “twin stick shooter” kind of deal with the triggers and bumpers doing actions and the sticks doing movement and aiming.
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.
The offending computers.
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.
Wednesday was a relaxing day for the group of RIT students in Germany. Instead of spending the day in Paderborn as we have done in previous days, we instead ventured out to see new locations and eventually made our way to a city called Bielefeld. The day was particularly sunny and warm, and made for a great day of walking around outside and enjoying the area.
In this city, we spent some time in the late morning and early afternoon walking around looking at the various shops in the area before settling down to eat lunch at a restaurant called Vapiano. While the menus were and unique style of paying for food via an accumulating card took a moment to understand, the food served at the restaurant was bursting with flavor and had various ingredients I had not heard of before.
After the lunch, we continued to walk around the city as we made our way towards Sparrenburg castle. In the city on that day they appeared to be setting up for a carnival, as Thursday was to be a big public holiday for Germany. It was interesting and fun to see all the carnival rides setup throughout the city streets and the various street vendors selling all manner of things from clothing to familiar “American Food”.
On the way up towards the castle I was able to see increasingly widespread views of the city, as the castle was perched on a rather large hill. Once we got to the castle, we had some extra time to spend while waiting for a guided tour through various parts of the castle, and I decided to spend that time taking as many pictures as I could. I was even able to get some wonderful pictures of the city from the ground level of the castle itself.
Once the tour started, we spent some time initially in the open air looking at various things in the castle yard such as the various castle towers and water well, but soon after made our way down into the crypts for a history lesson on the castle itself and the lifestyles of those who inhabited it. Down in the crypts we looked at the general dining area for the various soldiers that lived there, the bakery where all the bread for the castle was baked, and even the castle jail. I found the tour incredibly satisfying, and most of the information in the tour was translated and relayed from German to English which I appreciated significantly.
After the castle tour was through, the group then climbed to the top of the tower in the middle of the castle to get a birds-eye view of the surrounding city.
Once some time had been spent at the top of the tower and everyone navigated back down stairs inside of it safely, the group primarily had one goal in mind: To eat Spaghetti Ice cream. To satisfy this goal, a group of our German counterparts discussed where the best place in the city was to acquire such a treat, and led us to an outdoor ice cream restaurant where we could experience spaghetti ice cream in the fullest. After dining on ice cream and discussing a wide variety of topics with those at lunch, the group decided on returning to Paderborn to call it for the day in order to rest up for the coming Game Jam.
On Tuesday, the trip in Germany took a bit of a step through time as we viewed and discussed technology from the past, and then looked out where some technology is going for the future!
The day began with a trip to the Heinz Nixdorf Museum where we partook in a guided tour for some of the exhibits in the facility. We looked at the very basic machines and technology that were developed and became the basis for modern computer technology. Most of these devices functioned as calculators and number machines, which was very interesting. The tour also went over the start of using binary based systems for technology, and some of the devices that used the earlier implementations of this system.
Eventually the tour made its way to more modern computer systems and went over how they were made, including earlier Apple and IBM machines. After briefly looking at the more modern computer systems, which I found much easier to understand how they operated compared to the older machines that involved thousands of different wires and plugs, we eventually made our way to the much more present day and somewhat futuristic technologies involved with robots. In this section of the museum, we got to look at a number of robots on display and briefly discussed some of the technology that is being developed for robotics and artificial intelligence. We spent some time interacting with the robots they had on display at the museum, and I was very impressed with how functional they appeared and with what they were able to do. One robot in particular was able to draw pictures of people that stood in front of it, and another was designed to seemingly be a personal assistant of sorts.
After that the group moved on to the Paderborn University where we ate lunch, and then discussed what we had seen at the museum with our German counterparts. Once everyone had eaten lunch, we then moved onto the Games Lab that they have setup at the University where we sat in on a lecture about artificial intelligence. This lecture was based on current AI implementations in the world, leaning more towards applications in video games, and then turned into discussions about where that technology may go in the future. I found this subject particularly interesting because I have spent some of my own personal time looking into the subject of AI and the different ways it can be developed and implemented. Specifically, I am interested in the concept of building Neural Network AIs that take in information and are able to adapt and form connections and decisions based off of that information. I feel these types of systems would make significant changes in the games industry and change the way we play games all together.
After that the group spent some time in the Games Lab itself play-testing the game “Q”, and discussing with our German counterparts the various elements that went into getting the game ready for a steam beta launch. After that, some of us decided to go shopping while others returned to the hotel or stayed in the Games Lab. In the evening, a board game night was hosted in the Games Lab, and while I did not personally attend due to jet-lag issues and fatigue, others participated and had a great time with the German students playing board games into the early hours of the morning.
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.
Similar game: Thomas Was AloneSimilar game: Giana Sisters
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.
From the top of the tower you can see a clear view of Bielefeld. What you might expect from a traditional European city: lots of red roofs.A view of the castle from outsidePhotobombing Penny
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.
Some couples would leave “love locks” on the railing outside the castle and on top of the tower.I also had the privilege of trying out Spaghettieis; a German ice cream dish prepared to look like a plate of spaghetti. I got bananas and chocolate sauce, but the original recipe has strawberry sauce to resemble tomato sauce. It is also made up of vanilla ice cream to look like spaghetti noodles, and shredded white chocolate to resemble parmesan cheese.
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.
