A few weekends ago I took part in the second annual EALA Game Jam. This year some folks from Pandemic were able to join us as well (so I supposed that should be the first annual EALA & Pandemic Game Jam). Nothing like bonding late at night staring at computer screens drinking pizza and beer while making games.
My game was a short abstract take on the financial crisis. To be fair, I spent a little more of my spare time on it afterwards, to add the tutorial and tune the difficulty, so it’s more like a couple weekends of effort than the straight up one weekend gamejam. Turns out tuning simulations for meaning is hard.
It’s built, like most of the other games were, using Angel, which is a (mostly) 2D prototyping engine that’s available open source on Google Code. It’s also spawned an XNA-based brother, AngelXNA. Or should the gender of a game engine be female? Anyway, check them both out for your prototyping needs.
I’d like to link to more of the other games here (since they’re way more fun than mine), but am not able to – hopefully EA will put up it’s own site for the jam soon.
Before you play it, definitely check out the in-game tutorial. And with all that, here’s my game: STCK
For what it’s worth, I sort of unofficially gender’ed AngelXNA as “she” on my blog: http://designerscroll.blogspot.com/2009/05/angelxna-spreads-her-wings.html
Thanks for the mention!
We also tried to make a “simulation” that had meaning, though the result probably doesn’t come across as meaningful due to a lack of polish. If you’re curious: http://globalgamejam.org/games/game-nom
Nice! Thanks for the link to the game, I like the whole grouping mechanic, and there’s a couple other similarities besides.
Yeah, I figure the mechanical engine & ship metaphors should probably also hold for game engines – I will keep that in mind in the future. :)
It’s hard! Preventing the suits from killing all the customers should be easier. Maybe I’m missing something. I really like the concept though. The mechanics make sense, which is awesome. I was trying to figure out something similar but I never got as close as you did.
Thanks Marc! Yeah, I went through several iterations of playtesting, basically going from easy to hard and back again a few times. Problem was, each time I only did it with one person, so the results varied by the type of gamer the person was, I think.
Ultimately I went with what I have there, where you can lure the consumers away from other suits pretty much only through lying effectively (and it’s much too hard to just push them away), because I wanted lying to have a stronger impact & because of what it says about consumers. :)
da best. Keep it going! Thank you