The First Game Jam

A little belated post about the impressions of the first Game Jam as I was busy with other university assignments.

The topic for the Game Jam was Addiction X. Every team could use their own imagination to interpret the topic as they saw fit. Afterwards, in the span of about 6-7 hours every team had to produce a playable game using Game Maker (GM). Game creation was intended as a cooperation between programmers who would write the code in GM and graphics artists who would create the visual elements for the game.

We chose to stay close to the original meaning of the word addiction, so our game is about a drug abuser.

The main idea is that as you run on a street, your health bar keeps dropping as you need more drugs. Taking drugs helps you maintain your health level. And the less health you have, the more frenzily you run. Beware of the large gaping holes on the street!

The game, Hooked on Power, can be downloaded here. Try it out and enjoy the vivid graphics created by the artists in our team! I must say I was impressed that people could make such visuals in just around 6 hours.

The game itself was unfinished at the time we presented it to the other teams – we could not get the power-ups working. After investigating the original source code, I could eventually pinpoint the problem and get the power-ups working. (The version which you can download here contains the updates.)

Pitfall!

In the behaviour definition for the power-up object, we had an “Outside Room” event and its action “Destroy instance – Self”.

Power-up objects were created at a fixed x-position of 1088. Bearing in mind our room size was 1024 x 640, have a look at this picture:

The leftmost edge of the power-up items, being 32 x 32 in size with origin at the centre, extended to x-position of 1056, making them being created outside the room. And the “Outside Room” event mentioned above destoryed them immediately. That was the reason we never saw them appearing on the screen, even though they were being created.

Hole objects, on the other hand, behaved correctly in the game although they were also created at x-position of 1088 and included an identical “Outside Room” event with a destruction action. The thing is, they were large (64 x 64) and as such, their left edge extended to the x-position of 1024. And it appears that when at least one edge of an object “touches” the room boundary, the object is considered to be inside the room. That’s what prevented the holes from being destroyed. However, just a little further to the right would have also caused the same problem with the hole objects.

About Rokas Paulauskas

2014  Programming

View all posts by Rokas Paulauskas →