It's a very special moment for us. After years of playing games and drawing things together, we will spend a weekend abroad to try and make something ourselves!

I feel that in many ways all the game gams and events Catherine and I have been attending in meantime have been leading up as prep for this one. It will be Christopher's first jam - but we're confident he'll be fine.

Things I'm taking (so I don't forget)

• 15" Macbook Pro and charger
• Latest Unity installed
• Photoshop installed
• Affinity Design installed
• Apple Mouse
• Mouse Mat
• Ipad Pro
• Wacom Tablet
• PS4 Controller

We're set on doing something 2D, as we're more experienced there. My hunch is that it will be easier to do something more gameplay focused than heavy on narration as that is easier to prototype. But let's see! I'm really looking forward to seeing what we come up with.

We'll post again about the game after the jam!

The general consensus was that the game was too difficult and punishing on players right from the get go. Even level 1, despite it being fairly slow paced and easy to survive through, was very hard to get 3 stars in. I was told time and time again that it was disproportionately difficult; that the 3rd star was unreasonably hard to get compared to the first and second. It is true: to get the 3rd star one had to get a near perfect run, no misses and all far shots. The reason it was designed like this was to prevent players from getting 3 stars without getting far shots - in other words to stop players from waiting until the bugs reach the bottom of the screen to shoot at them. Of course this makes the game very boring! The player must be motivated to get far shots to make the game interesting. And so I made it so that the player had to get far shots on top of a high streak number, making it very difficult. I managed to fix this problem by giving the player more points for getting a far shot, so that it was easier to get 3 stars and the player would still need to get far shots to do it.

Another significant change I made was adding a shot predictor, or “pointer”, which shows the player where their shot would go before they’ve actually shot anything.

This made it much easier for the player to aim and shoot successfully. Of course, I believed it made it too easy, removing the joy of figuring it out yourself. I decided to compromise by making the pointer shorten over time. In the later levels, as the number of total bugs increases, the player must spend more time without the pointer. I like this system as it shows the player how to play; it teaches them how to aim to start with but leaves them to do it on their own after they have had time to learn. I now understand it’s important to ease the player into your game: make it easy to start with and teach them how to play it, and once they’ve learned, give them challenges to apply that knowledge.

Finally, I decided to add a survival mode. This was a very interesting exercise. Here I changed it so that the bugs would never stop coming until the player dies. It was difficult for me to decide how to increment the difficulty without making it boring or impossible to play: on one hand, I didn’t want to increase the speed of the bugs until it was impossible for the player to kill them in time, but I also didn’t want to keep them at the same speed because it would just get boring. I had to test the game with a bot to see what the “maximum possible play speed” was, in other words what the highest speed of the bugs could be for the player to still have enough time to kill them. It was in fact much higher than I had anticipated! This made it much more interesting as, at the top caterpillar speed, if the player even made one mistake they would probably lose a life.

Overall I am happy with the changes and hope that it has improved the experience. The next step is to add more levels to the game: I would like to increment the difficulty more slowly, and to do that more levels is certainly necessary. I’m glad the people around me encouraged me to continue developing this game rather than go on to make a new one, as it is more valuable to be able to maintain one large piece of software than simply create a bunch of small, messy ones.

The hackathon started on Friday evening. We did not come prepared with an idea beforehand - just a few technical constraints. Unity and 2D. We mainly just wanted to make something fun.

After having some pizza at dinner, we settled on the idea of a game that would be set in a warehouse where the player had to pack boxes of food with the correct ingredients and load them in a truck. After all, we all worked at HelloFresh and built supply chain management software. We also agreed that making it multiplayer (local co op) would make it a more engaging experience.

1 hour later and we had some rough sketches, a github repo and github projects set up for the project. We got straight to work! Two developers, Nenad and Tomaz paired up and began coding the core logic of the game: player movement and picking items up and down. Kieran and I put together an asset list and started making some cute pixel art.

Time flew by and we decided it was best to get some rest on the Friday night. We left around 2AM feeling quite happy with how much we got done - we had the basic control mechanics, a character spritesheet, 10 fruit assets and an animated conveyor belt. It was clearly the beginning of a game - although there was still tons to do.

On Saturday we knew we had to get the majority of the work done. Frankly what exactly happened when is a bit of a blur - but we definitely did a lot! First I focused on creating the assets for the boxes in different states - open, closed and carried. Then throughout the afternoon I worked on spritesheets for players 2, 3 and 4. Making a multiplayer game definitely needed characters that could be easily distinguished. Kieran worked on the warehouse parts - the truck, table and a few more objects for the conveyor belt. The dev team worked on getting animations of the characters working with the controller input, as well as the recipe behaviour in the boxes.

We fell a bit into the trap of all working in the same scene in Unity and getting some merge conflicts, but otherwise it was a breeze working together. By late in the night we were able to play test the game with 4 players loading different ingredients into the boxes, the box closing after 4 being entered, and then loading that box into the truck. All very entertaining.

The key things that were missing was the end game logic and a more complex game mechanic. We had the basic put food in the box part - but it needed to have more feedback based on if you put the right ingredients in. It would be important to have some kind of scoring system so that the players knew how many good vs bad boxes they packed.

It also needed more kinds of action to avoid the game feeling too repetitive too quickly. To do this we settled on a 'random events' mechanic. This was where an event could happen, triggering some kind of effect on the players. For example, a 'Rocket Internet funding' event could add extra time to the timer or a 'phone call' could make the players slower. In the context of a local multiplayer game we knew this would make the game a lot more entertaining. We reflected these random events in the UI by Slack inspired notifications.

Screenshot of game:

We stayed up past 3am on Saturday. It was awesome to build so much and get the more functionality in. There were still a few nice things to have (title screen, end game screen) but overall we decided it would be good to get a bit more rest.

The team was pretty tired on Sunday. Presentations started at 1pm, and the main thing we focused on was ensuring that the game played well. We tweaked the weights of the ingredients and improved the UI of the events. We also polished up the colliders and fixed a few of the bugs. Before we knew it, the morning was over.

Presentations were 5 minutes each. We briefly explained the game and demoed it. Then for around half an hour the judges tried out the games. Multiplayer games are always fun in this kind of environment!

There were 4 categories of prizes: Best Overall Game, Most Entertaining Game, Best use of Amazon Alexa and Wildcard game. We were awarded the Most Entertaining Game. The prize of this category happened to be Nintendo Switches! The team was super happy! Especially me. It's something that I was always planning to buy.

Overall I must say it's really good fun to go to hackathons with work colleagues. Together we got to be creative and just build stuff with no pressure. Would definitely do it again!

You can check out our game here.

The theme of the game jam was “nature”, and the spirit of the jam was to create a game that could communicate to players the state of the environment. In a more broad sense, it was to make a game with a greater sense of purpose through raising awareness about nature. Of course, jammers were at liberty to do as they pleased, though everyone clearly made an effort to follow this theme!

I ended up in a group of 4: Again with Emily and Luis, and with an artist called Nomi. We decided to make a game showing the difficulties involved with protecting the environment due to our personal drive to continuously make our own lives better. You would play as a man in his mid thirties who recently became the CEO of a mining facility. He has a family: a wife, a son and a daughter. During the game the player can move around his office and interact with certain objects to find out more about his life.

Eventually the player receives a phone call from his secretary and he is told he must decide whether he wants to expand his mining facility.

If he chooses to do so, the wildlife in the area will be at risk due to the site being located near a river and forest. However, the mining facility’s profits will soar and Mr. Dave Stones (the name of the player’s character) will get the chance to send his children to good schools. The player is taken 10 years in the future and can see the consequences of their choice by again interacting with the objects in the room.

A similar choice is then posed to the player. This occurs a total of 3 times, giving the potential for 8 different endings. Of course, it being an 8 hour jam, we weren’t able to fully flesh out all of these! Currently the game has 2 complete endings, one being where the player chooses all for personal and the other all for environmental. The basic message the game gives is that in today’s society we are so focussed on achieving personal goals we forget the greater forces in play which also change due to our actions. It was really interesting making the game as it is very different to all other games I’ve ever made.

Again there’s a fairly long list of things we weren’t able to implement! We didn’t have time to implement all the animations and were only able to put the forward idle animation. We didn’t add a sense of time progression throughout the scene by changing the visuals of specific items in the office (for example, making the potted plant wither). We weren’t able to add all endings, only 2 of 8, as the content was so much. I would say for sure that the main challenge was managing everything: we had several pieces of dialogue per scene, and a total of 7 scenes, plus 8 possible endings branching from those scenes. I believe as a programmer I have to work on making it easier for content creators to quickly add things and be able to change things more easily. Often I found when we wanted to make one small change we had to go back to every scene and change the same thing 7 times!

I really enjoyed this jam and I appreciated the emphasis on story that the games created here had. I hope to attend more similar to this one. I’m also a strong believer that games have a lot of power to communicate and educate people. It is the only medium which allows people to become involved with a story through interactivity, and I think that has a lot of power to make people invested in the experience.

Head over to the Civic Jam website to find out more about it!

However, that is changing.

Fast forward to 2016, when 2 key things happened:

1) I bought a decent smart phone (One Plus 3) and an IPad Pro.
2) I started building games in LOVE2D.

1) meant that I had good hardware and access to both the Play Store and the App Store. Having the platforms made all the difference as I knew I would be able to access both tablet and phone experience. (I'll confess that I was pretty late to the whole high end smart phone thing as I spent most time on my computer).

2) meant that I began to have much greater appreciation of simple games. Because it's so hard to make a game, right? And having that new found understanding made me want to try out more mobile games. I could look at them and imagine what it might be like to program them. (AAA titles are too daunting to play that exercise with).

I've been doing the obvious: checking out what's on the front page of the stores and download whatever is free to learn from. This is mostly on Android - although I've done a bit on iOS as well. It's been interesting. There seems to be an abundance of 3 in a row puzzle games paired with an Overworld that lets you overview your progress. And of course - make in app purchases or open treasure chests to watch ads. If it isn't a Candy Crush Clone then Clash of Clans inspired. Or a simple of effective physics based game or an on rails runner.

In fact, there is a fair bit of variety. Due to the sheer volume I'm know there's so much I still haven't tried or heard of. It feels like it's not so easy to discover the gems just by browsing the top plays list.

In the past months of exploring the scene, here are a few of the games that have been the most memorable.

Evolution Planet - by Pyro Mobile

This game takes a slightly different spin to the classic 3 in a row puzzle games. On completing a 3 in a row, the creatures merge together and evolve into new ones that can also be lined up in a row. The sound effects, pacing and variety in the level design definitely stands out as high quality amongst the over saturated genre. There's a good range of activities, from evolving a certain number of a species, to boss fights, and star challenges.

Image taken from play.mob.org

Orbit - by Highkey Games

Orbit is a real gem, that I was lucky enough to spot on the front page of the Play Store. It is a simple and beautiful simulation of planets orbiting blackholes. The player controls launching planets into a trajectory and the goal is to get a certain number into a type of orbit. It's a very soothing game which made me remember my love of Mechanics in school. And it even has classical music in the background. Highly recommended.
Image taken from Google Play Store

Kingdom Rush - by Ironhide Game Studio

I forgot how much I enjoyed tower defense games. When I downloaded this I was surprised at how addictive it was. It follows the usual things players would expect: spend gold to buy archers, soldiers and mages to defend against waves of enemies. It's very polished and has great sound and visuals. It also has a variety of difficulties which makes it more interesting if you want to really test yourself.

Image taken from kingdomrush.com

I have barely scratched the surface of mobile gaming but these are my first impressions and experiences now. I am also interested to look more deeply at games by Nintendo and Square Enix that are for mobile.

Overall I would say that mobile games still feel like how magazines are to chapter books. Shallower, but there are certainly some high quality ones out there. But the fact that they are easier to get into and pick up and play can only mean that there is more time overall to spend gaming.

I'm glad I've now been dedicating time to mobile games.

Yesterday I attended the March mini game jam and with my team of 3 (Me, Emily Claudet and Luis Busta) we created a simple action game called Toasted. The player controls a piece of fresh bread whose dream is to become the best fresh sandwich there is... But it's in danger of being toasted by evil slices of toast which try to block its path to grabbing sandwich pieces. The game is played on a grid and the toasts spawn at random all over the grid. The goal is to grab fresh sandwich pieces - cheese, tomato, lettuce, etc... And to avoid the toasts which pop up from the toaster.

The real challenge we encountered while developing was inputting the desired animations for the toast movement. We wanted the bread pieces to flip - meaning they had to change sides whenever they moved one square. This meant the bread's four possible movements' animations were directional, i.e. the required idle state animation and four possible movements in each direction changed depending on which way the bread had moved previously. We weren't sure the best way to implement this!

Of course 7 hours isn't a lot of time to figure out things like this. When we return to the game for further development the first thing we'll do is work this out!

What exactly does beasting it mean in our family culture?

Beasting something is to attack something with full force. No filler, no randomness. Just pure focus and obsession over the details of the thing you are doing.

Here is a list of examples of Claudets beasting:

1. Drawing a sprite for 8 hours straight with no food break.

2. Playing through the whole of Mass Effect in a weekend.

3. Making Pokemon comics non-stop throughout the whole of half-term.

4. Creating a music video from one day's filming.

5. Making a 2 minute stop motion video with plasticine of your favorite video game throughout your entire summer holiday.

6. Staying up until 3am making a Charlie and Lola card for your little sister's 4th birthday to send in the post to CBeebies.

This is only a sample of the countless times we beasted it. We will be keeping track of all this as our posts continue.