October 21st, 2008 by torncanvas
The third Iowa Indie Game Jam was a great success! It was held this weekend October 17-19 in Cedar Falls at the apartment of Andres Reinot, an 8monkey Labs co-founder. He hosted an artist from Phantom EFX, several hobbyists and ISU students from Ames, four members of our company Intuition Games, and some friends and co-workers who stopped by just to wish us well or participate for a brief period here and there. Unfortunately, there was no internet access at the apartment, so this is a recap (it could probably be seen as a blessing in disguise :P).
This time there was a specific theme, which was “2d vs 3d.” The goal was to decide on a concept and make interpretations of the concept in both 2d and 3d. Most of us showed up on Friday night, socialized for a bit, got a sneak peek of the graphically-impressive Darkest of Days, and started brainstorming. The concept we came up with was exploring what it’s like to fly and be sensitive to wind patterns through the mechanics of grasshopper flight. You’re a grasshopper, and you can jump, fly/glide for a brief period, free fall, or dive bomb. You travel throughout a world and must deal with changing wind patterns in different areas of the sky. Joe made a really fun joke about how the player could be searching for a female grasshopper, and when he found her, he’d say “nice legs.” It went over well enough that everyone agreed the project would be named Nice Legs. That’s our Joe!
Brainstorming on an HDTV was nice. 
The 3d team - composed of Andres from 8monkey Labs, Paul from Phantom EFX, and Ken from ISU - were going to use 8monkey’s Marmoset Engine and its tools as a foundation from which to build the game. The 2d team - composed of Joe, Mike, Greg and myself (Josh) from Intuition - were going to use Box2D, Joe’s partially-developed tile engine, and Flash as a foundation. Kira from ISU was going to illustrate a grasshopper, which could be used by both teams if need be.
The 3d team presided in the living room to the right. The 2d team was in the kitchen at left. Pictured at center holding the laptop is Mike Holtan. He joined us for a large part of the game jam working on his own version of the concept, which was a one-on-one grasshopper jousting game using physics based on actual grasshopper anatomy (think Toribash with grasshoppers and jousting). He was using the game to teach himself Box2D and Flash.
We split up into our teams and got to work. It was fascinating to see how each team went in their own direction. The 3d team, headed by Andres, went in a more flight simulator route by focusing on realistic flight physics and tuning the controls to an Xbox 360 gamepad. The 2d team went in a more platformer route by getting the tile engine up and running, and focusing on creating sections of the sky that acted as wind patterns.
Here’s Mike, who’s birthday was Oct. 6, enjoying some belated birthday cake. Thanks to my wife for making me enough cake that I’d have leftovers to share with Mike.
The end result of our game jam was two sandboxes in which we could explore the mechanics of our game, and both seemed to provide some good promise that a fun game could be made out of them. Neither team was able to complete a finished game, but everyone seemed pretty inspired to keep working on the projects after the weekend was over. Thanks to Andres for hosting us!
In the next post, I’ll upload some screenshots of the 2d and 3d version of Nice Legs and go into more detail about each one. In the meantime, feel free to head to the iowa indie game jam photo page to see the other photos.
October 9th, 2008 by aeiowu
On October 18th, some friends at 8Monkey Labs are hosting another Iowa Indie Game Jam with us. This will be the third in about the span of a year and will take place in Cedar Falls, IA. We think it’ll be the best yet! Basically we’ll all get together for a weekend and try to come up with a game or two. Working together in spirit, yet competing against each other with the ferocity of one hundred glaciers, one on the 2D side, and another on the 3D side. This will undoubtedly decide the ultimate question: “2D or 3D, which is better?”
If you’re a developer in Iowa, or around or the MidWest, or just happen to want to come and participate in the jam, email us at team [at] intuitiongames [dot] com. If you’re a player, we’ll be posting pictures and tomfoolery here during the jam as well, and then when the game is out and about, we’ll post that here too. If any of you guys have ideas for a game, post them in the comments, maybe it’ll sprout more ideas or make for a good base for whatever we cook up.
October 20th, 2007 by torncanvas
We’re here and we’ve cracked open the laptops. It’s time to begin. I’m going to set up a chat in this post for those who are participating remotely and anyone who wants to “stop by” and say hi.
(Game Jam is over, chat removed)
October 15th, 2007 by torncanvas
Bigger. Better. Baddassier. The Iowa Indie Game Jam is back. Game development indie style is happening this weekend in Ames, Iowa. Not sure what game we’re going to make yet. As for platform, current discussion is between DS homebrew, Flash, and Silverlight.
It’s going to be awesome. And we’ll post progress on this blog. In case you were wondering about the talent that will be there, here’s a list:
August 15th, 2007 by savethedinosaurs
I was downtown at a cafe on game jam night, and since I don’t have a laptop I had to improvise which turned out to be a very unique game developing experience. I haven’t done any research on this topic or anything but I think I may have pioneered a new method which I am calling the Argentinian Bluepawed Dingo Craigslist Dungeon Esperanto Friendship Galaxian Handoff method (the ABCDEFGH method for short). Here’s how this Next Gen method works:
Step 1. Draw some stuff.
Step 2. Text message the coordinates to Josh’s phone.
Step 3. …and the programmers do the rest.
It’s advanced and you know it!
In all seriousness though, it was pretty fun and kind of felt like I was creating punch cards for computers in 1972 and sending the data with Morse Code…….Ooooo, we should try that next time.
August 14th, 2007 by torncanvas
This weekend was the first Iowa Indie Game Jam, and it was a great success. Its beginnings were humble and spontaneous. Andres came down to Des Moines to see the coolness that is going on here - this weekend it was The Grey Market. While visiting, he proposed having a game development jam session. I thought it was a great idea. So, since he didn’t have his laptop and my apartment was about 85 degrees, we decided to head up to Ames to his parents’ place.
Our original goal was to make an asteroids clone that created background graphics after you destroyed asteroids with a continuous laser that could reflect off of other asteroids. And it was going to be done in ActionScript 3.0. Well, we soon found out how different AS 3.0 is from 2.0, so we sent out an S.O.S. to Mike B. to save our butts.
(from top-left clockwise: Josh L “torncanvas”, Mike B “fucrate”, Andres R “monkeyscience”)
To our surprise, Mike H. showed up on his way out of town to visit some friends. He ended up staying the whole time.
(from left: Mike H, Mike B “fucrate”)
Thankfully he had a camera to document the event. Soon after, Mike B. arrived and proposed creating a 50-lines-or-less Flash game, inspired by a recent competition on the Kongregate forums. After some discussion, we decided to make a dungeon crawler with this restriction. That proved to be quite the challenge…
Everyone got pretty sucked in, which was great, and eventually we worked into the wee hours of Saturday night. The aftermath:
We had breakfast together the next morning and came back to work on more of the game. Pretty soon Greg showed up to join in the fun, too.
(Greg W “aeiowu”)
Not long after, I had to leave, but the IIGJ continued as everyone worked in true indie fashion on an old school favorite: the dungeon crawler.
There’s already talk of the next Iowa Indie Game Jam. Rock on, independent game development.
