Scottish Game Jam, the branch of the event in which I participated, was hosted at Glasgow Caledonian University, organised by the fantastic Romana Khan. Nine teams took part in the Saltire Centre, an impressive (though bright) space, loading up on caffeine and sleeping on couches (if at all).

My team “Frat Boys from the Hood” consisted of Abi, Jess, Andrew and myself from Abertay joined by Alex, a third year student from Glasgow Calendonian. Working on a theme of deception and constraints mandating that we must include “a sink, a wink or a rink”, we built the 2d side-scroller “Panda Dragoon: Bees on Ice” with the aid of the Unity engine.

The game places our panda protagonist in a black and white world, fighting deceptive and equally monochrome foes. Gliding through an ice rink, the player must switch between black and white in order to see enemies of the opposite colour. However, switching also empowers these enemies—the player must be cautious—causing them to change form and cause increasing damage. Luckily, the player is equipped to defeat these creatures by firing bees from its mouth. The aim is to progress as far as possible as the game increases in speed, achieving a maximum score.

Although the event overall was non-competitive in nature, Scottish Game Jam welcomed judges from Denki and Real Time Worlds to critique the resulting applications and to decide on a winning game.

Much to our surprise We Won!

It was really reassuring to make such a self indulgent game, for ourselves and not for a nominated target audience, and yet have four out of five judges award it their highest score. Obviously the game has flaws, we made it in 48 hours, but with another week of tweaking at some point hopefully we can create something compelling and genuinely fun.

Overall, I had a fantastic time and would encourage any developer, especially artists, to take part next year. It’s amazing how much you can learn and achieve in just two days.

Download and play The Game.
Global Game Jam
Scottish Game Jam

I figured as a quick introduction I would work on a clone of Rotation, an Asteroids/Duo/Space Invaders sort of game which I created in Flash a couple of years ago.

Overall things went (slightly surprisingly) very smoothly. Initially I had to cling the script reference but once I had a better idea of the functionality available, everything started to come together. I don’t have much experience with comprehensive game engines like this, but Unity certainly seemed to provide far fewer “Why on earth was it designed like that?” moments than I’ve experienced in the past; it also took far less time to get a general overview of in the first place. I can already see how this tool could be useful for quick gameplay mock-ups as well as complete, commercial products.

So do I wish Unity had been a possibility when we worked on Some Assembly Required last year? I’m not sure. In some ways, I think it perhaps makes things too easy when it comes to games programming as a learning experience. Sure, there are a lot of great features and we almost certainly could have created a more complete game in the short time we had available, but at the same time we wouldn’t have learned about using and integrating 3rd party libraries, structuring the application overall or converting and importing troublesome assets.

That’s also a reason I’m hesitant to keep working on this project – I’m not sure I’m getting as much from it as I could by tackling something more technical or in a different language. We’ll see what time permits though, as working on a game to completion is obviously a challenging exercise in itself and it seems possible that having the engine there would allow me to focus on difficult problems while the other stuff is taken care of.

Since I’m not terribly sure this project will make it any further though (I do have an honours project to take care of, amongst other things), here’s the little segment I’ve completed so far:

• You’ll need the Unity Web Player.
• Use left and right arrows to rotate your ships.
• Use space to shoot the cubes (asteroids. Probably thrown through space by bugs we’re at war with on some distant planet)

Anyway, if you’ve given Unity a try leave a comment below and let me know your experiences!