Over the weekend I participated in Edmonton’s first foray into the Global Game Jam which is a gathering of game developers, artists and sound and music engineers in an attempt to create a game from conception to completion in the span of roughly 48 hours. Needless to say, it’s a hell of a weekend from start to finish as you desperately try to get that last piece of art or that important line of code into the final project. I want to go through the process of the project myself and my group, some of the people from Gauge Entertainment, went through.

Sparing the trivial details of actually getting to the event and first impressions, I went with the guys at Gauge with their game idea. They wanted to make a game that I can best describe as the flash game Toss the Turtle but with a high-tech sniper round, a 3rd person camera, and a final target, which seemed simple enough to at least get something going come Sunday. Now, of course, that ‘something’ would likely turn into just a proof of concept as we opted for a 3D engine for the 3rd person camera as we just did not have enough time to do much more.

Now in out rush to get things started and going we didn’t quite do something that we all realized in hindsight: we never prototyped and as such we dove right into making assets. While that worked out to some degree with our project leader and his modeled bullet with appropriate particle effects, it didn’t quite work out for myself and my quick and dirty materials. Had we aimed at creating the prototype from the beginning I feel we could have coordinated better and ended up with something a bit more representative of the target idea. That said, our final proof wasn’t all bad.

In the end our programmers were able to allow the camera to follow the projectile as it should and give control to the player after firing it. This at least gave a rough outline of how we wanted the game to control and how to build levels according to the variables put in place. Now I can only hope that we continue the project, there’s much we can do to make this a true game.