They survived - 24 hours of game making is successfully over!

The two groups both finished their games right at 2pm, 24 hours after their start. Each game had levels, theme music, obstacles, a win condition. One group kind of lost their way and need to do some rethinking, but their game was playable. The other group kept their original goal simple and tuck with it - although they did rethink how to program it about 2AM.

Here are a couple of screen shots:

Paradoxical Irony

Jimmy's Crusade




THe students are fixing a couple of last minute bugs they found when they played them. THen they'll put the games up on the YoYoGames website. WHen that happens I will put the links up so you can play them too. They're also supposed to give me some art and screen shots and post mortems. I'll post them too.

Here are some pictures of the students playing each others games. Everybody was offering advice on strategy and cheering as level after level was completed.

 

 

A reporter covered the event so if a story appears I'll link to it.I think everyone had a great time. We're all excited about going to the Global Game Jam in January 2010. THey learned to work together and draw on each other's talents.

A very successful first time event. Here's hoping for many more!

game interface ideas from other fields

Check out this dashboard from a Ford car (the Fusion I think) introduced at the 2009 Detroit Car Show - here's a link to the post.





Like a videogame, the info needs to be scanned often and quickly, and understanding it can't distract too much from the other tasks underway (shooting monsters and cruising along at 75 mph (don't tell my mom I speed, ok?). This dashboard has taken those needs into account with visuals such as bar graphs for gas and power steering fluid levels, for average MPG. And check out those vines; they live or die based on how fuel-efficiently you drive.


Check out the link in the article cited above for the Lamborgini dashboard - wtf?


Once you learn what all the dials and needles do (read the manual? - I don't see much text on the dashboard itself), is this a better idea for a videogame interface?

Here are some pictures of other dashboards for comparison.

Image via WikipediaImage via Wikipedia




We need to look for interface ideas in lots of other info-rich places - maybe those car GPS systems, or even things like complicated phone bills or monthly statements from people with actively traded brokerage accounts or mutual statement quarterly statements.

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I want this

Image via WikipediaMass DDR at the Videogame Expo. They had 32 people all dancing at the same time on wireless metal dance pads. The screen at the front showed a bubble for each player to let them know beat by beat how they're doing. The top 10 scores (and dancer numbers) were shown oat the bottom of the screen. And people were having a great time. It wasn't just kids or girls - everybody was dancing together. The man running the show played songs at different difficulty levels so everybody could have a good time.

(ps - this was my first attempt at using the FlipVideo I borrowed from school - the quality is pretty awesom considering I was in a darkened room, on the floor, holding the camera propped on my knee)

Here's the video

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