We wheeled up on last Thursday evening and entered into a real gamers electronic wet dream (dangerous, that). The club was kitted out with comfy sofas, a free bar, a DJ and MAHUSSIVE HD screens attached to shiny games consoles, free for anyone to mooch on over and play!

So in we trot, eyes glinting and super ready to be bamboozled by mind-bending challenges mixed with fancy graphics and some of the best games the goliath of Sony could throw at us.

But… while the staff at the event were great ambassadors for gaming, geeing you on with silly chat and mini-competitions, I’m afraid I felt these “unreleased games” would stay better being unreleased for a while.

Playing on the console they were unresponsive, unnatural and failed to make me care about the character. It’s odd; that companies with so much gaming heritage can miss out on a few simple pillars of game design.

While I don’t presume to understand the complexity of design of a PS3 game, it just felt there were a few playful basics missing:

RESPONSIVE CONTROLS

Players don’t want to feel cheated by their character when controls repeatedly don’t react naturally. Play Booty Juggler!

NARRATIVE

Games need to have a reason, we like ones with playful learning. To be honest though. we’ve all played enough First Person Shooters and puzzle games, they now need something better than ‘just shoot baddies’ to keep me playing. Play Artist Rooms!

GAMEPLAY FIRST

..fancy graphics later. Play Fire Kills!

The games we were playing were: FIFA12, GoldenEye, Uncharted 3 and Resistance 3.

So thanks Playstation, but I think I’ll be sticking to lots of other games for the time being.

Views expressed are entirely Dan’s, so there.

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).

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

The festival eases into action this evening with a Moose Safari, and the headline game La Noche de Los Muertes kicks off on Friday. It is already massively over-subscribed and is shaping up to be a spectacular chase across the city.

My other two personal favourite games Rainbow Rain and Sneaks and Blaggers are also fully booked, which is a shame, but I’ll be doing my best to bagsy a spot.

And before signing off I’d like to draw attention to a special little sub-game that will be running throughout the festival. It’s a battle between Bristol’s media agencies to see who is – Bristol’s Biggest Player! The ideas is that agencies get points for playing igfest games and the more they play the more points they get. Given all the press the festival gets, it’s a nice way to shout about the great media talent we have in this city, and encourage the agencies to get out into the streets and play.

If anyone has any thoughts on how we could pimp igfest, please do get in touch. And if you want to volunteer to help run the festival, please get in touch. And if you want to play – get your arse down to Bristol town centre on 11, 12 and 13 of September for some serious frivolous mental fun-ness. Over n out Cap’n.

Online gaming – loads o’ press

Mobile Pie let us in on a cool site they’ve been ‘researching’ recently, it’s called ImInLikeWithYou which is a painfully addictive social on-line gaming site. It’s got a really simple suite of games, keeps you updated with who’s playing now, and the barrier to entry for playing is so low, you’re going to follow the link and not come back for hours. Interestingly and obviously they’ve just close 1.5million of investment to advance the online gaming cause!

PeaceMaker – play the news

All the boys have played games where we fight in WWII battles against the baddies and we’re all used to playing history, but what about a game that let’s you control a conflict which is much closer to our time. PeaceMaker allows us to play the Israeli & Palestinian government

“PeaceMaker challenges you to succeed as a leader where others have failed. Experience the joy of bringing peace to the Middle East or the agony of plunging the region into disaster. PeaceMaker will test your skills, assumptions and prior knowledge. Play it and you will never read the news the same way again.”

Sounds good dunnit!

Real physical stuff off Facebook – not just a gif!

Hippopost have started allowing users to send free personalised postcards to anyone they want! They offer to pay the postage and send it for you, but how’s it free? It’s clearly being paid for with a big shiny advert getting included on every card sent, also I wonder if they have a cheeky tick-box for adding you to a 3rd party mailling list?