The GGC! Presenting our games! Receiving awards! What a way to finish the year!

Gotland Game Conference invites people from the business with experience from the game developing world and foreign universities, people from japans industry were roaming around the game hall and trying out some innovative games. A selected few of the people from the business acts as a Jury, evaluating the games presented during the GGC, to later on present the results at the game awards ceremony. Attending and  presenting games are students from first, second and some from the third year.

The Flash & Crash Banner!

Background

After building and creating our game for a 8 weeks period of time with a lot of struggles, ups and downs, itterating, changing the concept, play testing and attending to weekly meetings. We finally reached our end station, the GGC.

The time was finally here, doing some final adjustments to the input, coloring and a button holder and we were set to go. The group gathered together at the workshop, making arrangements, planning and getting ready. Everyone had their task to carry out.

We found our spot, set everything up and just waited, we planned to have our game stationed at all time, so we divided the time so that every set of two would present our game an hour each (and of course, that time wasn’t followed at all). Now waiting nervously about what people would think of our game, they called us in for some speeches that were held in the presentation hall.

Our results

The first day took place at Wednesday 28, people were streaming in from day one, mostly judges, students and staff. So we all took advantage of this opportunity to try out as many games as we could. A lot of games were really appealing, Oculus rift horror game was really cool, but I could stand more than 5 minutes and felt sick right away, others were able to play for longer periods of time (I guess it takes some time getting used to). Puzzle games, solo racing experiences, card games, arcade, and networking. Yes you could find almost anything!

On the second day you could find friends and family coming to try out the game of their children, friends and parents. The game hall started to become crowded, people shouting with joy or sighing from not coming first in a race.

The third and last day. It has been some hectic days, my knees and feet started to hurt from standing so much, but it felt so worth it. People coming over, playing our game, enjoying it and their expressions brought me joy. I can’t remember the last time I was so proud to present something I was part of. But the conference was coming to its end, and we all were talking to each other, we discussed the possibilities of us winning, but we knew that it would be a hard fight. We were facing our peers, friends and the classes that had more experience than us in game development. I was pretty sure that the game Crocodile Cow Down would be a winner and of course I was hoping for us to be the ones making our speeches on the scene.

The final event, the one we all were waiting for has come. Gotland game awards.

I stepped in to the hall, everyone was already there. I found a place and sat down. Oh god how I wished that I had gone to the bathroom before this thing started. First I didn’t care that much, I sat there just waiting for it to start, and finally the assembly hall lights went out. A big picture presented the ceremony, music went on and everything started! The trailers we made was presented one after another, you could see them all! People were shouting a part of their trailer popped up at the big screen! Then comes our, Flash and crash, the racing balls crashing around the course filling up the screen with graphic and motion, I shouted out and applaud with joy! I was so proud to be there! As the person I am this amazed me, this was not like me, I was enjoying myself! The trailers ended, and people stopped applauding. Ernest Adams stepped up on the scene, gave his speech and presented the judges that would present the nominees.

–        Best first year games nominees are…….

I couldn’t believe it, Flash & Crash was on the list of nominees!!!! But “Crocodile Chow down” won that one, we got nominated four times after that, and we were always one step under Crocodile (they won four awards, we weren’t on all their lists though). But it was still a joy itself, we didn’t think that we were going to be nominated at all. The last nomination was from Nicograph http://art-science.org/nicograph/nicoint2014/, where we ended up in second place.

We were told that we had to attend at their meeting that would be held on Saturday, where we needed to present our game to Japanese professors and on Sunday we would get our awards.

So we received a Japanese fan as a gift for the group, and each member was handed a diploma. We ended the day by taking a group picture, and that group was like around 30 people or more. That ended our hard working week! And it has been a great experience for us all!

My thoughts

If I would talk about the game I would say that watching people play it I came to recognize all the things that we could have done better, a more pleasing way to proceed  with the level design, so a note to oneself:

After completing a challenge, don’t let the player be able to accidentally fall back in the completed challenge. For an instance, there was a pit you had to balance over, when you complete it you would end up on a safe platform before going on to the next challenge, but if you accidentally rolled back the ball you would fall back into the pit and had to get yourself up and redo the challenge (A really bad design).

Buttons that has to be activated has to really have a visible body and feedback that would make the player understand the reason for that button being there!

And if someone fail, there should be a quick way to redo the challenge, waiting for an elevator to take you back to square one is just irritating.

My feelings regarding the whole project, I have a thing I would like to share. I didn’t recognize it until after presenting our game at the conference. This was starting to be a kind of turning point for me as we presented our games, I started to see how people appreciated what we had done and what we had achieved. As we had our conference I started to write down my ideas, and I really feel that I am starting to enjoy this. I will try to keep this post updated every week to keep track of my progress, let’s see what the feature have in store for me!

Summer is coming! Font forget to visit our Facebook page to see some videos!

Here are some pictures!

The game station! This is how it looked like when we presented the game at GGC

Masasuke Yasumoto built an input where you use a Japanese bow to kill enemies. The bow is real but not the bolt. When you stretch the bow string and release, depending how far you’ve stretched, the projectile will travel a distance and hit the enemies presented on the screen ahead of you. I found the game really amusing and ran over to him to take a picture before he left!

This is Masasuke Yasumoto, Ph.D from Tokyo University of technology.

My diploma for the 2nd place!