Game Jam and Traffic lights

Last Friday (11 Oct) there was a Game Jam at the University, for all GAME students (I’ll refer to all who study Game Design and Graphics/Programming as GAME with capital letters).  “Everybody is a Noob Jam” was the fitting title of the jam, and we got to create playable games in about 8 hours. The game had to be made in “Game Maker”, and had to be based upon the two words “Everyday” and “Doom”. Even though me and my group (team “Dead Socks”) had some problems deciding on what to create and didn’t really finish anything other than a guy walking and a car stalking said guy in a side-scroller, I enjoyed the challenge, and we had a lot of fun – especially towards the end when we were tired and slightly high on sugar. Our “game” got the fashionable title “The everyday life of Jörgen”.

Let me introduce you to Jörgen;

Jörgen is a very ordinary man. He works, watches bad movies, borrows books at the library and buys milk. The original game-idea was that the player would play as Jörgen during an ordinary day in his life. The player was to move through the sidescrolling village, making their way towards a few goals (get to work, rent a movie, etc) and whilst doing this there was supposed to be a bunch of unexplained things that was going to kill him (like, picking up a coin from the ground, the coin turning into a black void consuming Jörgen = death). However, as the two programmers of the team were on another lecture for the first 2 hours of our work-time, the three graphic students (myself included) didn’t know how to test anything or if any of it was easy enough to finish in 8 hours.  When the group got together and finally begun working, we didn’t really plan the work time very well, and ended up with something more like a “walking my car”-simulator rather than an actual game. We at least managed to capture some of the feeling we wanted – as the original idea was to make the players ask themselves “What is this?”, and that’s exactly what they did, for different reasons than originally planned however.

We’ve begun working on a bigger assignment in the Design-class. The assignment is to design a “shoot ‘em up” (shmup) game of some sort. Or, at least make it move up, down, left and right (2d, viewed from above) and have some obstacles like walls to move around. We’re going to make a paper-prototype of the game and pitch it to the class. Then the groups will create a game designed by another group. So the game we’re designing is probably going to be created by another team of first-year-students.  I’ll see if I’ll upload some sketches or such from this assignment later.

Another thing I just wanted to mention is that I’ve just realized (or, I realized some week ago but thought about it again today) that in Silent Hill 2 there are traffic lights in the streets, and they change colour. I hadn’t seen that before, and it made me stop and wonder why they changed colour. Yeah, traffic lights are supposed to do that, but why do they do it in Silent Hill? What’s the reason for them changing? Do they really need to change when there are no cars driving around, and no humans (except for James, Angela, Eddie, Laura and a few others) strolling about the streets? Is it to make sure that the lying figures and manikins don’t get run over by the broken cars? Or is there perhaps some deeper meaning? I’ll have to look into this.

Another assignment, for this week, is to play Bioshock Infinite and analyse the narratives and characters in the game. I’m glad that I’ve already watched the entire game, and played a great deal of it too. So when I’m finished writing my scientific text on why we play horror games (why we choose to feel fear) I’ll wrap myself in some blankets, cuddle up in bed and play some Bioshock.

Have a great week guys, anyone who reads this.

/MPh