Padstal Game Jam #1

vince

Hello To All

Padstal Game Jam(Voted as the name when we started) is a game jam I started at my college to create an atmosphere of making games and sharing ideas.
Many people at the college would like to make some games but either don't know where to start or just need some motivation and this was why I started the jam.
The main focus being knowledge sharing.

The jams are two weeks long so that there is enough time to concept, code, receive feedback and give help to those who need it.

On the 18th of May we started the very first 2 week long jam, meaning today was the end of the first jam.
I chose 4 themes from previous Online Jam Competitions and we then voted for a theme.
The winning theme was Huge vs Tiny
For this first jam we also had the constraint of using Visual Studio only, so most of the games were made using Windows Forms(WinForms) or Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF) and C# only. No external libraries.

I made this decision so that they could learn some common concepts instead of a specific engine.
The next game jam will not have this limitation, but they are still welcome to use WinForms/WPF again.

So here are all the games that were created in the last 2 weeks in alphabetical order:

Aga.in - @Havok_Maelstrom
An Agar.io 2 player clone.
Controls: Player1-WASD, Player2-Arrows

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XIqhQJD0O1b1Q5TWJyemxabWc

Ant Smash - @StruggleCuddle
You play as an ant that collects bread crumbs to score points, while avoiding feet trying to smash you.
Controls: WASD

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XIqhQJD0O1anZJRGtTZDhXbzQ

Ant Throw - Mitch & Flip
You also play as an ant, but this time you need to throw apple pieces to your buddy on the other side of the room to score points.
Controls: A & D to move, left click location to throw in that direction

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XIqhQJD0O1VkU0TW1jVFRIaUU

Brown_Notes - @dieKreef
A musical game where you catch keys as they are falling down. (Doesn't fit theme but was created in the jam sessions while just experimenting) A missed note that leaves the screen deducts one point. You lose when score reaches 0
Controls: QWER to catch appropriate notes. Use space to catch any notes you missed.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XIqhQJD0O1TW8tSXpLWkVIaWM

Doom Blocks - @Vince
A sidescrolling puzzle game with 4 levels where you need to morph yourself(Between Tiny and Huge) to solve challenges given in the level.
(Warning: Might induce rage)
Controls: A & D to move left & right. W to jump. Space to morph.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XIqhQJD0O1Q0RhUnExMEp2Q2M

Jumpin Jack - @Estian
An infinite runner where you play as an alien jumping from roof to roof.
Controls: Escape restarts game, any other key to jump, tap twice to double jump.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XIqhQJD0O1ZEo1OE02UTZIZ0E

Why am I Bread? - Danie & @RadicalCrypt
An infinite runner where you play as a piece of bread running from a toaster while trying to avoid evil kitchen utensils.
Controls: Spacebar to jump, hold to jump higher

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XIqhQJD0O1OWJ4Q3RrRjdQaU0

Search Party - Louis, Tyrone, Murray
This is a game from the CGI department of our college and they used Unreal Engine 4. The reason for this being that they do not do any coding and they asked if they could participate using blueprints and the engine and this is what they produced.
You play as a Nutcracker toy and you are looking for your three friends: Dusty the bunny, Dougie the duck and Masipa the mouse.
Controls: WASD to move, space to jump. Left Shift to sprint. Click to use keypad. F to switch between first/third person cameras

No dowload link for this one, as the size of the standalone is 800Mb.

Quicklink to folder that contains all the games - https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XIqhQJD0O1YnMwU2d0NVd6OUE
*I will replace names with Usernames when they have signed up, which I advised them to do.
*If anyone is interested in the source code of the projects, just message me and I will supply it.

Feel free to ask any questions about or give suggestions for the game jam, but feedback on the games will be great!

Thank you for reading.

Elyaradine

Whoa, cool! :) Which college is this, and do you intend to continue doing these for the rest of the year? That would be pretty awesome.

For future jams, I think it'd be useful to pick constraints that are (optional?) challenges that can potentially improve a game's design or marketability, e.g. "Only use two buttons" generally makes it trivial to have the game's input suited to mobile, or "Local co-op" might be something that'd be useful for couch co-op that many gamers have been calling for. In this particular jam, for example, I don't think the final product would be improved much, if at all, by having to make it all on VS. (At the end of the day, players wouldn't know, right? If you wanted a "technical" challenge, it might be that the game has to run smoothly on last-gen mobile or something, which might get people thinking about perf, or games that are entirely 2D/UI-based. Players absolutely *would* notice if the game wasn't running smoothly. Another "technical" challenge might be to have participants have to completely swap projects after the first x rounds of feedback. They would likely gain an appreciation for clean, team-friendly code.)

Is the art team's game just that one room? I don't know how big Unreal games normally build to be, but 800MB sounds quite excessive. (I would imagine oversized textures is the culprit. Quick anecdote: when I was in art school, one of my peers textured a character's belt buckle at 4kx4k. :P) Maybe shipping the game on <100MB could be a practical constraint?

Super happy you posted this. I really hope you continue doing these jams!

vince

Hey so excited that we got a reply!

The college is ww.IT-IQ. Thanks to them for allowing this, since we do our jams on Wednesday afternoons, they scheduled most students to have an off session during this time. (The jams are optional)

Thank you very much for your ideas and I will keep them in mind and surely use a few in the future, especially the idea of swapping code, since it might work well with how our jams work currently.(See below) The VS only constraint was only put in place since I didn't want to scary anyone away or discourage them from joining because they don't know how UE/Unity works. Since this was the first game most of these entrants made.

Yes we are planning on keeping this up for the rest of the year at least, since that's when I will leave. Hopefully someone else wants to keep it going.

The way we are doing it is on the first Wednesday afternoon the theme is voted for and we review the previous jam's results and vote for a few category winners. Everyone can then share ideas and form teams.

The next Wednesday we get together again and you can share your progress/idea and get some feedback and assistance if you need any. Also during the week a few others and I are available if anyone should have a problem.

Then the final Wednesday afternoon is the conclusion, where everyone gets a chance to showcase their game and have the others play it. We then do what we would do for the start of the next jam as stated above.(We might take a week long break in between in the future)

So today we voted for the new theme and nature was the winner. The themes are as with most jams open for interpretation.
Hopefully we get more students participating as this what I am driving: participation and learning, not full release titles.

In regards to the art team, their game is only that one room yes. But they have said that they didn't keep in mind their texture sizes as they are using a lot of 2k textures, but they will scale them down tomorrow. So I will add that link if they can get it to a appropriate size. Thanks for the confirmation, as they were afraid that they re-scale it all and the size would still be too large.

Tuism

Well done! This looks great, lots of amazing stuff for a first game jam!

Ongoing game jams really do wonders for making games (sounds obvious but it's not in practice), so keep that up! At some point it'll also be great to keep an eye out for the great outside jams, to get even more experience engaging with the rest of the world (I will advocate Ludum Dare forever, and the stuff made here is already better than 50% of stuff that comes out of LD), to get more diverse feedback input, exposure, etc.

Having creators play each other's games is a huge win :) Watching other people play has no substitute :)

mattbenic

Hi @vince, welcome :) It's great that you're running these jams. @AngryMoose and I were impressed with the fundamentals you were learning at IT-IQ when we popped by a few weeks ago, and I think jams like this will seriously improve on that as well.
We definitely need to make a plan to get you lot to one of the MGSA meetups as well, maybe a carpool to joburg is in order?

BenJets

This is really great to see! What an awesome success for your first jam. Keep going @vince!

vince

Thanks all for the great comments. It is great motivation for all of us!

We're definitely going to try and get a bunch of us at a meetup. Probably the July meet up since our vacation starts on the 15th of June and many students will be on vacation already.

We will also definitely start doing outside jams and try to collaborate with others.

Again thanks for all the positive comments.