Reflections of Alumni Day 2

Day 2 in the trenches. 

Yesterday was the second and final day of the Alumni days which was dedicated to a Game Jam with the theme of Everyday Doom and it had to be made in Game Maker.

Not having a group and starting to get desperate, Alex, Wilhelm, Björn, a 2nd year student namned Axel and I joined forces and began working! 

First, we needed a base of operation. Since Alex, Wilhelm and I had a class in Written and Spoken Communication, we kind of fell a bit behind the others. But as soon we were finished the gang retired to an empty office in the D-buidling.

Björn and Axel, who didn’t have any Communication classes, had already been sketching up ideas. We settled on a simple Shoot ‘Em Up where you had to infiltrat Valve headquarters and stop Gabe Newell who was trying to shut down the Steam servers (Everyday Doom indeed).  

Since Axel was our only programmer, he was in charge of the scripting and creating the properties if the objects in the game. Björn designed a lot of the level and came up with some of the objects which needed to be in the game. Alex and I were the artist of the group and were responsible for the sprites. While Wilhelm was the only one with experience in GM, so he assisted Axel when he had problems and then he helped me and Alex with some sprites.

We had a good plan och design of the game, and Alex did some amazing sprite work with his Gabe Newell! But we quickly ran out of time and we realized that the few hours we had to make the game was not quite enough. We got most of the objects and sprites in the game, but we didn’t have time to create some pathfinding for the AIs, so they were just running into walls and got stuck there.

With just a few more hours we would have a pretty good (but super simple) game! 

Other than that, Kajfa Tam from Massive came to us and gave a little presentation of how he got started in the industry. I think I remember seeing him during last years GGC so I recognized his journey. But it was nice to hear it again, now that I’m actually a student here! 

The day ended with some (free) food and gaming at Rindi. The games we were playing was of course the games we created during the day.

It was a lot of fun since this was our first Game Jam ever! And I thought that my group had a good dynamic and idea. But with so little time, it was hard to create something playable. But it sure was a lot of fun!