This past January took place the second Barcelona Game Jam held by VGAFIB as part of the Global Game Jam.
We started on friday with a lecture imparted by Microsoft partner student Alex Hernández about Window Phones and game programming with XNA for Window Phones. After that we were suposed to do a lecture about Kinect SDK but due to last problems with the receiving of some Kinects Microsoft had lent us for the game jam, we changed it for a short speaking showing Unity3D while doing an easy game about a ball that had to go from a point A to a point B being inside a maze.
At 20 o’clock the game jam officialy started with the keynote. A lot of well-known game developers shared their opinions about game development: John Romero talked about team work, Baiyon from PixelJunk explained how he understands innovation and told he came with the idea for one of his games just by watching how random noise appeared from moving a cartridge inside an Atari, Gonzalo Frasca remarked the importance of self motivation and valuing own creation despite not winning and finally Will Wright focused on fast prototyping and making a game in 48 hours, The keynote is available online so if you want to watch it you have it uploaded here
Once the keynote ended the organization comunicated the main topic for this year:
A lot of ideas and games came into our minds but before starting to code something was necessary: group forming. Everyone went to the corridor to start some team making activities: everyone had to write down in a postit his idea and after that all the postits were sticked in a wall.
After that every idea was explained by its author and the different roles he needed for the project. This took a while but finally everyone had a group: a total of 12 teams made from 42 participants. While all this was being done in the corridor we helped VGAFIB organizing the tables, chairs and placing network cables. When everything was prepared the jammers came into and chose their places.
Everyone worked hard the next thirty hours in order to finish their prototype. We started with two main ideas: on the one hand we thought about a snake-like game being played in a spheric world where you had to eat you own tail and on the other hand we wanted to use the Möbius strip which is a surface with just one side. We where discussing the different ideas while dinner and finally decided to do the two projects and connecting them as there was a subtopic which consisted in connecting two games.
Based on the idea of Möbius strip we developed Moebii (playable here) where you play as a pea with a jetpack who has to join cubes of the same colour in order to increase the available seconds and try to last as much as possible.
The snake project was made by Vaca during spare time (can be found here) and they both were connected this way: if you eat a pizza in the snake-like game you give a cube to peaboy, and if you make a group of cubes in Moebii you make a pizza appear in nyan-snake game.
Everyone worked hard to finish their games. Sunday arrived and the presentation of the job done. After that, all participants let the others try and play their creations. A lot of awesome projects were crafted! If you want to give it a try to them you can visit (and play!) them here
We have enjoyed a lot this second edition of the barcelona game jam and are very proud about the level seen. We whish the organizers and the other jammers have had a good time too!
