Last weekend about twenty of Bristol’s finest game designers, developers and associated talents sweated blood, sweat and more sweat (the PMStudio is WARM) at Bristol’s leg of the Explay Game Jam. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the games jam, let me elucidate the rules slightly in a dramatic film style….

24 hours. One theme.  Some people. Their mission: make a game.

That’s about it really. No stifling rules on programming language, group size, games mechanics or the like. The games don’t have to be screen based, and the attendees don’t have to be in the games industry. What results is a rather lovely hodge-podge of talents, working styles, crazy ideas and heavy drinking.

Arriving on Friday evening, after a brief round of “I am X, I do Y and my favourite game is Dragon Ball Z” (not originally a game, but the pun doesn’t work otherwise, pedant) we split off into teams. The two Thought Denners in attendance, Technical Director Dan Course and Studio Manager/misc George Rowe were two facets of ‘Team Disco’, a six headed hydra also including sound designer/father Owen, film maker/Mohawk enthusiast Sy, script writer/games designer/sarcasm aficionado James and illustrator/dinosaur impersonator Nat (who also wrote a blog post about this).

Team Disco in full effect: misc, sound, develop, film, program and draw

Ben Rhinehart of Mutant Labs, who are part-organisers of the Explay festival, then proclaimed the Jam’s theme to be ‘mirror’. While we reflected on this (ho-ho) we were also treated to the first of Jam’s amazing meals, a home cooked Indian feast.

Curry + beer = ideas

Much post curry brain storming ensued, with different coloured pens and post it notes in full effect, and after a couple of hours of solid synapse bashing we had whittled our ideas down to a streamlined game of disco themed British Bulldog with Medusa and vampires which happened in a temporal cycle of light and dark, with a dating element that also used Chat Roulette and AR…

We quickly adjourned to the pub before our idea got anymore out of hand, where we discovered another team were working on EXACTLY the same idea (well, it had Medusa in it). What to do?

Saturday dawned, and we discovered James had been up all night with our idea spelled out in scrabble pieces, a common practice in the game script writing paradigm. Fortunately, it turned out that our original idea was an exact anagram of ‘turn-based game that’s a bit like Frogger with bugs, but they have mirrors and are being attacked by an angry kid with a magnifying glass’. Who knew?

The place was starting to look like a morning at Thought Den

With the final idea down on paper, another amazing meal, and late comer George arriving with a mirror ball, the stage was set for some serious game creation action. James and Dan cracked on with creating the game in Unity (which Dan had never used before), while Nat started drawing some lovingly detailed bugs and Owen attempted to create the loudest laser/klaxon noise he possibly could. Film maker Sy decided to document the whole game creation process and managed to create a great five minute snapshot of the event:

What was the resulting product? Well, I think Nat described it very well in her blog post on the day:

You are a bug trying to reach the discarded sandwich, but a kid with a magnifying glass stands between you and the gingham paradise, trying to fry you to a crisp (with an entertaining fizzling sound, thanks Owen) It’s a tactical multiplayer, each turn a player moves forward a small distance and positions their mirror anywhere in a circular radius around them, once all the players have moved you hit a button and the kid with the magnifying glass randomly spawns and sends out a ray of sunshine-death which can either hit a bug directly or bounce off another bug’s mirror and potentially hit a rival. The first to the sandwich wins.

It’s not exactly ready for release, but what do you expect in one day? We had a lot of fun making it! You can play it here: http://us.thoughtden.co.uk/GamesJam/

Some quote highlights from Team Disco:

“But I supplied the graphics to you beautifully?”
“Yes, but what YOU fail to remember is that I am massively incompetent”

“Guys, you know how our game is like Frogger but with bugs? Would anyone be offended if we call it Bugger?” [Bugger was later contracted to Buggr to make it well currentz]

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Our rival teams created some fantastic little games in their time. Team Mirrornaut created ‘Mirrornaut’, a side scrolling 8-bit platformer programmed in C Sharp. It’s a bit like Canabalt but with a button to swap to a mirror image of the level. The character also looks like he has an awesome afro, though I think that is just the Team Disco influence and it’s actually a helmet. The graphics are really cool, as is Nick Dymond’s soundtrack, and the whole game is very polished.

Team ‘Late’, as they were dubbed in the DropBox race to the finish, decided to show off and create two games in the 24 hours. One was an iOS app for two players created in GameSalad, based on reading mirror images of words, and could quite easily have been submitted to the app store at the end and gone on to international acclaim. Their second game was a 3D affair, where you play Jason (of Argonauts fame) who must fend off the deadly gaze of loads of attacking gorgons; it left us both awe-struck and a little scared of David from Echoic’s “Medusa, give me back my fleece!” sound effects (though I don’t think they remember the story of the myth quite correctly!)

The Bristol Game Jam was a fantastic event, and we met a lot of great people who do and love similar things to ourselves. A massive thank you has to go to Debbie Connor and Tomas Rawlings of Aurochs digital for their hard work in organising the Jam, everybody who attended and contributed, Korash, Ben and Ella from Explay, Debbie’s neighbour for the amazing food and Lethal Bizzle for providing the post jam entertainment (seriously).

Think of this post as a club sandwich. The juicy filling is our new game for Tate and National Galleries Scotland – we’re so damn pleased we can’t stop playing it and the gaming gauntlet has been thrown down! 27,000 highscore… But juicy filling alone doesn’t make a classic club sandwich. The bread-rock (yeah!) of any decent hunger-buster, neatly organising the contents, adding bulk and protecting keyboard-bound fingertips the world over is, of course, a few fine slices of the good stuff. And so it is with great pleasure we’d like to explain, explore and excite you with our working philosophy of ‘playful learning’, the bready goodness that helps us make digital sandwiches with substance.

A call from Tate…

Back in the depths of 2010 we received a call from Tate inviting us to pitch on a large educational game to support the ARTIST ROOMS tour. This is a collection of world-famous artworks by internationally renowned artists created by Anthony d’Offay and supported by the Art Fund. We pitched against some London big boys and a few West Country comrades and won the gig because of our characterful approach, something we have been refining since becoming founding residents of the Pervasive Media Studio in early 2008.

Thought Den’s credentials in game-making go back to 2005, when the founding directors worked under the wings of such Bristol luminaries as Andrew Parkhouse of Team Rubber and Dan Efergan, now Creative Director of Aardman Digital. In those early years, we built some addictive niceties such as Race Doggles, My Abodo and the more recent Fire Kills for the Central Office of Information and Swamp Drifter for Southern Comfort. But alongside a strong gaming portfolio, Thought Den were establishing a reputation in the education industry with e-Learning tools such as Parashoot and face-to-face workshops for students and professionals. (If you think we have bad hair now, watch some of our daft videos for a real education on bad haircuts)

ARTIST ROOMS : The Game

Over an intensive 6 week brainstorming and specification period we combined the various learning objectives of Young Tate with our gaming experience and THIS is what came out the other end, about 6 months, 200 artworks and 60 hours of 3D modeling later. Play the game for yourself.

The aim of the game is to choose one of 10 artists, select 5 artworks, and hang them in a 3D space that you can explore at the end of the game.

Before you get there, players must earn points in 4 categories, all inspired by the real-life challenges faced by Tate and NGS curators.

• Interpretation (knowing all there is to know about the artworks)
• Preservation (making sure they are not damaged, and are hung in their best condition)
• Lighting (each artwork will have different requirements for light levels both to preserve the artwork and present it clearly)
• Marketing (you gotta let people know about you! A blog perhaps…)

The highscore

If anyone can beat this highsore, we’ll take them on a VIP trip to Bristol Museum when ARTIST ROOMS comes to town in June 2012!

Press

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Contact the studio for Press enquiries. Download press pack.
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Things that people have already written about the game:

Art Daily

Museum Association

Jonathan Jones on Guardian Unlimited

On Twitter :

@EuroArtNet “Top story: Artist Rooms | Young Tate goo.gl/ez0tC”

@neatcraw “Clever little Artist Room game by the TATE..play it, waste time, it’s fun.. http://t.co/YtuaIwz. Scored 8,623!!”

@kettlesyard “So we’re all having a go at the Artist Rooms game but none of us in office here are that good, obviously in wrong jobs! http://t.co/80rtAa5”

@SelinaSargent “This is quite possibly my favorite game!! Who wants to be a curator?? I DOOO http://t.co/c0airyk”

@wandsworth_arts “WOW this is really cool @Tate http://t.co/yD6W65q”

@CultureKeyNice “Artist Rooms game from Young Tate http://t.co/ZBUVPog”

What’s next?

Tate invited us to pitch on an even bigger and more awesome and exciting project! Check out the app icon…we can’t say any more, probably not even this, but use and look for #magictateball

A closing thought

We learn when we play, and that is the core of our working philosophy. Our job is to create entertaining experiences with substance. We do this by combining the notorious Thought Den bounciness with long-established academic partnerships (thank you to the Centre of Excellence in Media Practice)and a few years of trial and error running educational events that have play at the heart of the learning experience.

A little environmental widget for your entertainment

So, we have just come back from a very exciting meeting about the first ever Bristol leg of the Extended Play Games Jam! Don’t know what it is? Read on, intrepid traveller…

The Extended Play Games Jam is a ‘hack-a-thon’ where a team of random creative/programmy/interested people come together and try and smash together a wicked good game out of the milieu of their minds, computers, beer and pizza in only 24 hours. It is a subset of the already pretty cool Extended Play Festival, held this year on November 3^rd-5th

The teams are given an overarching ‘theme’ which is only revealed at the beginning of the challenge, so it’s a little like (insert TV gameshow simile) gone mad! These games are then taken to the Extended Play festival itself, where people ooh and aah at how amazing/crap something is when made in only 24 hours. There might also be a prize, but by then someone had brought out mini rolls so we stopped taking notes…

Sounds good ey? For the first time ever this year they are running ‘pre’ events in (at the time of writing only Bristol and Plymouth, but hopefully others) which will again be 24 hours to rub together and create something cool at satellite sites on October 1st. These pre events will be live linked by Skype/Google+, enabling all manner of idea stealing and e-flirting fun.

Given the rich heritage of games development peeps in our fine city (Mobile Pie, Red Wasp Design and Mubaloo were all also at the meeting, amongst others) there was a general consensus that Bristol are going to SMASH this competition into West Country winning chunks.

We are also particularly excited by the idea that 29 creatives and just one developer will turn up, and what sort of games will manifest from the resulting 3000 mood boards (mood board bingo anyone?) But it’s also a great opportunity to get together with some of our local colleagues and have a few beers and a laugh.

Coming? See you on the games floor…

If you want get involved with one of the existing pre-Games Jam Jams:

Bristol – Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol
Contact: Tomas Rawlings - tomas.rawlings@redwaspdesign.com

Plymouth – Plymouth College of Art, Tavistock Place, Plymouth PL4 8AT
Contact: Dan Stubbs – dan@explay.co.uk

Or if you want to organise your own:  ben@explay.co.uk

Want to see what makes Thought Den sites stonking?

It’s all about making a site that’s too simple to update, still looks hot and does a lot of work for you while keeping the Search Engines happy.

Have a gander below then chat to us.

Sexy designs

Mmmmm it’s good looking and it’s in a Content Management System

Easy to use as Google mail

It’s so easy to edit your pages, login, click, type and published

Modules

We use Drupal for eCommerce, blogging, staff profiles, Calendars, Events, Embedding widgets, Twitter, Facebooking.

Pick what you think you’ll need and we’ll get it!

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Work with us to sort out your keyword data, then it’s quick to keep your site updated

Staff roles

You can assign your different staff different privileges. Some are bloggers, some edit the marketing some can just be twitters… we mean tweeters!

 

Open Source baby

There’s frequent security updates being passed your way. It’s cheaper. It won’t lock you into 1 company’s software package for years

Check out the other companies, charities and organisations who are covered…

Doh!

Or is it a “Doh!”? This email has actually come from a chain of events starting at a simple idea, putting it to Paypal, getting it selected, heading to Whitiker House (Paypal UK HQ), being part of Paypal’s entrepreneurs discussion group and all the way to actually receiving some honest sqilla’ for it!

Not bad, eh eh eh and here’s a piccie from the day with the other entrepreneur winners, I’m the goon posing on the side…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54389050@N05/5038261043/

In-fact our  competition entry said, “give us £100 and we’ll buy an Apple Dev licence”. A pretty sensible thought with all the requests for iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and iPad apps our studio is getting.

Low and behold, we won it and now, Thought Den is already working on our first app for the iTunes store!

And here’s the official mail out, (head to Ideas 101)

Official email

So now TD is officially producing apps for the mobile market using our extremely honed skills in games and rich website development. Contact dan@thoughtden.co.uk if you think you business, game or idea will be better placed directly in the hands of your consumers as an app…

…and please don’t send me a good looking spammy email. I will click it.