The biggest Global Game Jam ever took place over the weekend, and as with last year I headed to the Scottish Game Jam venue in Glasgow to take part. With almost 100 developers attending, this was one of the largest sites in the world.

Teaming up with Andrew Glass (part of my team when developing Panda Dragoon last year) along with artist Craig Mooney and designer Daniel Cleaton (two fellow Abertay grads who I hadn’t worked with before), we had 48 hours to develop a game on the theme of “extinction”. Our idea of choice was Chinthrilla, a fast-paced platformer featuring a jealous Chinchilla set on causing the extinction of tortoises everywhere who must race against intergalactic conversationalists trying to save them while dodging the hammer-head land shark.

Overall we created a fairly complete game (given the timespan) with relatively few difficulties compared to the pipeline and source control issues we worked through last year, with an astounding amount of textured 3D artwork given that it was created by a single artist. However, the gameplay style we attempted was far from ground-breaking and we could definitely have had a deeper look at the theme. I think when faced with 48 hours, especially during an event which only takes place annually, it’s tempting to choose a project you’re confident can work. Next year though I’d like to try something more experimental, even if it doesn’t result in something playable.

This years event involved fantastic feedback from mentors for improving the game, great coverage of the entire event from Square Go, and free pizza provided by sponsor Nokia. The highlight for me though was seeing all of the games at the end of the event, and in particular the entire audience screaming at a dying polar bear to go on and keep swimming. It was a great weekend and I look forward to the next.

All Scottish Game Jam games on the GGJ site
Summary from Square Go
My Flickr Stream
Video of Chinthrilla
Chinthrilla on the GGJ site, where you can download it or play online
Chinthrilla on the SGJ site

Having freshly installed Windows 7 on my laptop (I usually run Linux) I’ve had to get hold of all the editors, tools and libraries I need again, and figured I would share here. Everything here is open source, free for non-commercial use or has a free trial version.

Programming

• Visual Studio 2010 for C, C# and C++ programming. If you’re a student you can get the professional edition from Dreamspark.
• XNA – nice to work with but distributing the game is awkward.
• Python 2.6 because I’m living (happily) in the past, along with Pyglet and PyGame (I haven’t actually used PyGame yet so will be avoiding it if possible).
• LÖVE, a multiplatform 2d game engine written in Lua.
• Unity. I really like the Unity engine and used it last year, but limitations in using source control and sharing projects with the free version are a massive hinderance.
• Flash in Flashdevelop with Flixel. I’ve only worked with flixel over the past couple of days but overall was really impressed.
• Notepad++, a great little text editor.

Art

I’m not an artist but it’s useful to be able to re-export a model, make your own cubes and create some disgusting coder art. Don’t forget: the more hideous you make your coder art, the faster the artist will replace it. Unless they stop to strangle you first. Sorry artists.

• Paint.Net, a huge step up from Paint.
• The Gimp, for the scary times when I need to do something more complicated than can be achieved in Paint.Net.
• Blender, for messing with the 3rd dimension and converting models.

Audio

• LMMS, an easy to use application for composition if we get so desperate I need to do that. Cover your ears if that actually happens.
• SFXR, a sound effect generator, and the online AS version.
• Audacity, for tampering or recording audio files.

Storage and Sharing

• Tortoise SVN and Tortoise Git – easy to use shell integration for source control.
• Dropbox – quick and easy backups and a simple way to transfer assets.

Recording

• Chronolaspe – a tool to record timelapses videos from screenshots or webcam captures.
• Fraps for recording the game itself.

I’ve probably forgotten a few things here, leave your own suggestions in the comments.

I’m really glad I took part and regret not doing so sooner. I was worried about having to create my own artwork and music, and that taking part would leave me exhausted for days afterwards and interfere with University work. In reality, I found having a game which I had created every part of incredibly rewarding and am quite proud of my artistic and compositional efforts, even if they’re nowhere near the level of the group projects I’ve worked on in the part. Additionally, I found that staying up for 48 hours straight would have been completely unnecessary and probably detrimental, and maintained fairly sensible hours.

I achieved much more than I had originally expected during the weekend, but definitely saw the jam as a chance to develop something cool with no obligation to continue rather than a competitive endeavour. That said, the community feedback has been one of the most awesome parts so far. It’s a really awesome feeling to have something I made actually described as “fun”, of course, but it’s the constructive criticisms on problems I recognised but didn’t have time to resolve completely, such as collision, elements I never thought anyone would play long enough to require, like an ending, and additions I hadn’t even considered, like your achievements affecting the game, which I am most thankful for.

Let’s Science

In response to the elected theme of “Discovery”, I made a simple research sim game called “Let’s Science”. You take control of a lab and its scientists, and direct them to make a series of ground-breaking discoveries in order to become a world-leading research facility.

I worked in Unity, along with Paint.NET (graphics), sfxr (audio effects) and LMMS (music). I had hoped to work in 3D (having practiced my incredibly basic modelling skills in Blender) but didn’t feel this idea would benefit from it – maybe next time.

You can check out the game along with the other fantastic entries on the Ludum Dare site.

For those not yet aware, Dare Protoplay is a showcase of games created during the Dare to be Digital competition. It’s running from the 13th-15th August at the EICC (Edinburgh) and entrance is free.

Two students from my CGT class are taking part this year, Andrew Glass and Iain Fergus, as part of the team Shark on a Bike so make sure to say hi to them! their promo video is here:

You can check out all of the other fantastic teams and games on the Dare website, and hopefully play them in person at the weekend.

The display was one of many attractions and events arranged around the city for Dundee Winter Light Night which, judging from the huge crowds, was a great success. Despite the freezing cold, plenty of visitors came to try YinYangYou and it was fantastic to see even young children be able to pick up and play the game. Hopefully the Winter Light Night will be organised again next year, perhaps with other student made games taking part.

Banner ad in the center of town.

Me!

The game from above in the Overgate center.

The projection and players

Look out for us at Dundee Winter Night Light on November 27th.

Unfortunately the Dare to be Digital website doesn’t allow us to change the idea we’ve posted to react to feedback, but if you leave us criticism and suggestions either there or as a comment to this post, we will read it and take it on board.

Thanks for your support!

Cantante by JulianRod

There’s been a lot of Linux discussion here lately, so I thought it was about time I get back to talking about games. Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the way two seperate components of a game, graphics and audio, have evolved seperately. In particular I’m going to focus on speech and voice acting.
 

Look at it this way: which is more realistic, the current 3d models in games, or a character reading a piece of dialogue? Even if the acting isn’t great, you’d probably say the latter. The voice sounds human, for the obvious reason that it was read by a human. I want to consider whether achieving this realism by using pre-recorded phrases is really helping games, or whether it is preventing audio developing further.

 

The Evolution of Graphics

Game & Watch : Donkey Kong JR. by Frankeib

Game graphics have followed a fairly clear path to reach their current state. From simple monochrome shapes on the screen to 8-bit sprites, from a few polygons to the 3d models we see today. Each hardware improvement sees more realistic models, better textures, and more human animations.
 
Of course, that probably seems obvious. We can’t simply film someone and import their precise shape and actions into a game. At best we can base a model on them, but at then at the end of the day you still need to make the model up from a collection of polygons. The reason I’m pointing it out, is because audio doesn’t work this way.
 

The Evolution of Audio

Audio had a pretty similar beginning to graphics. Initially, all that was possible were the two beeps heard in Pong. Again, as hardware improved, more could be achieved. Midi soundtracks could be played. Basic synthesizers could be used to get a sound that almost resembled a word or grunt. Then storage space and audio hardware improved to an extent that pre-recorded audio tracks could be played back – first on PC and then later on consoles. Obviously, this was a huge leap in the realism of dialogue and speech. Now, a real human voice could be played back in cutscenes and throughout the game, instead of simply using text or being able to mimic a few words.
 
Audio has of course continued to improve. More can be stored, with games like Elder Scrolls Oblivion featuring hours of dialogue. The quality of recordings (although not necessarliy voice acting) has also continued to develop.
 

The Problem

Mic on Boom Arm by RalphBijker

The issue with this method of delivering speech lies in its inflexibility. You have a limit to how many phrases you can store, and they can only ever be played back. In fact, this is parallel with graphics – animations are stored and played back as part of the game.
 
However, this doesn’t help solve the problem. If, hypothetically, in the future we were able to create a program which would allow us to procedurally animate characters realistically, our current system of defining bones and vertices would support it. (This doesn’t seem an unlikely situation, already there are programs which can look at a creatures muscle and bone structure and find the most efficient way for it to move, just the calculations take hours rather than the fraction of a second that games require.)
 
With audio though, we can’t create a brand new phrase out of those we already have stored. To even start to compose a system like that we’d have to store thousands of words which could be arranged into sentences, without even thinking about expressing different emotions or tones.
 
This depth of this issue is shown when you think about your actions throughout an average day. You probably preform a lot of the same motions over and over: sitting down, walking, typing, eating. As for talking though, almost every sentence you say will be unique.
 

The Solution

Eventually, I believe the gaming industry will need to look to Text to Speech applications as a solution. Whilst we may suffer a temporary set back in terms of realism, this method will offer several benefits in the long run:
1. It will only be necessary to save a range of sounds, instead of a series of phrases, no matter how much speech is required from a character.
2. Localisation becomes easier. For a new language you simply need a new set of sounds, and to translate a set of text phrases, rather than re-recording all of the dialogue.
3. It could become possible for low budget games to purchase sound boards with all the audio required for the text-to-speech programs, rather than having to use low quality voice acting or text.
 
Initially, I’d imagine it would only be possible to play back phrases written in text (perhaps using phonetics to improve the accuracy of what is read back). However this system has a lot of space for evolution: as both hardware capabilites and AI improve, it could be possible to generate more and more sentences procedurally, giving more meaningful and realistic interations between characters.
 
The issue is… to develop a great system we need to start with one which is less convinving that what we have now.

Over to you…

What are your thoughts on dialogue in games?
Do you think a change is necessary?

1. Many packets of pacman sweets.
2. Guitar Hero T-shirts.
3. Press goody bags including a Gamer’s Guiness Book of World Records.
5. Edge magazine.
6. Countless pin badges.
7. 4 Talent goody bags including a 2GB flash drive.
8. Gamestation goody bags including 3 t-shirts and a load of Xbox 360 stuff.

He also met and introduced us to ‘Sam’ from Codemasters who was really friendly and eventually asked up to shut down his 360s after he went to catch a flight.

 
On the second day we were hoping to go to a talk during our lunch break on the Pandora but unfortunately the person who was supposed to be speaking failed to turn up.


Instead we met Mario…

…and Phil and Ryan offered him some mushrooms.

 

The third day Phil and I were working downstairs trying to sell some t-shirts. Unfortunately with all the free ones being given out and the fact we were trying to sell white tshirts to bunch of people dressed only in black, it didn’t go all that well. However it did give us a chance to check out the games.

We stayed to help pack up after the event but thanks to members of the Dare to be Digital teams packing a lot of the stuff away it didn’t take to much time.

If you want to find out more about Dare and play some of the previous games, check here.
If you want to know the three winners of Dare to be Digital 2008 check here – I met Brian Baglow several times at EIF without actually realising he was the same person who writes ScottishGames.biz >.<