Here are some quick impressions from our first Delta Engine Game Jam (Friday, 2013-02-08). The topic was "Death". Our next Game Jam will be bigger and better and starts 3rd May 2013 till 5th May 2013 (you can either just work on your game on Friday or spend all weekend).
All the games shown here were build with the Delta Engine Milestone 2 and will be part of the Samples so you can download and try them out in the next releases, but there was also a team building a Java game. I don't have a screenshot, but you can check out Andre's game here.
We started by buying some food, there is even some healthy stuff in there, but not much. We also ordered Pizza and bought more Beer later.
Our amazing Game Programmer Phil (living in China) was working on his own on a game called "Blob". He was working on vector rendering and did a cool intro for his game, but then ran out of time to actually build some levels. Next time we should pair him up with some artists.
Another team with 2 programmers from the office and an artist from Italy build the really bloody game "Tanfius Must Die".
The biggest team at the office build a pretty complex RPG like game called "Til Death" with adventure like cut scene scripts. They have completed 4 levels and have everything from long funny intros, 4 unique maps and path finding. The mission is to protecting a guy or girl from zombies until he or her can finally die a natural death so the main character can harvest the soul properly. Credits include: Joey, Michele, Janina, Kerstin, Melanie, Flavio and Gero (and some others helped as well I guess). The game is amazing and everyone was surprised that they managed to put so much content and functionality into the game with this early version of the Delta Engine. However it does not work on most PCs (not even mine, so I have no screenshots from inside the game) and needs some reduction (500MB?) and finetuning before it can be released ^^
Because of a Dentist appointment Kirsten and me started a few hours later and build a little "Game Of Life" game with the twist to actually prevent life from spreading. It is called "Game Of Death" and the goal is to kill little rabbits before they multiply too quickly and take over the world. You can hit them with a mallet or burn them down, but they will get stronger over time so you need to resort to biological and even atomic warfare as the game goes on. The more rabbits you kill the higher your score will be. The whole 14-15h I worked on this game was streamed, so you can watch the way I approached Test Driven Development in a stressful environment. There is obviously some hacking going on, but you can always see unit tests helping me along the way and it really helped finding bugs quickly and even fixing several issues I found with the Delta Engine while adding features for our game (particle effects, font rendering, playing compressed sound files, etc.)
Last but not least here are some impressions from our presentation on Friday:
Everyone agrees this was a great event, we all learned a lot and had tons of fun. We even improved the Delta Engine, fixed issues and now have a bunch of useful sample games for others to check out.
Till next time, remember the date 3rd May 2013 for the Second Delta Engine Game Jam :)