A screenshot from our game, By The Beat of a Butterfly Wing
Short Description
By the Beat of a Butterfly Wing is a game I made with 3 other guys @ No More Sweden 2010 (Jesper Taxbøl, Erik Rodrigues Pedersen and Tim Garbos). The game is 2D side scrolling platform game, where you have to navigate a butterfly to a goal on the other side of the level. The twist is that in order to reach the goal, you must navigate giant spiders, ride on steam trails that carry you into the air, fly between platforms and solve mechanical puzzles.
For me, the one of most interesting details about the game, is the mechanic about riding the steam trails /air bridges that can carry you higher into the air. I regret, we didn’t have more time to explore the steam concept, as I feel there are tons of things we could have done with that, like steam powered mechanical devices, air ballons, etc.
The second most interesting detail about the game is that it was made by four programmers, and because of that, most graphics and all sound and music have been downloaded from various websites on a free to use for noncommercial purposes license.
Try the game by clicking here, and please come back here to tell me how you liked the game.
| Game presentations at No More Sweden. The clip of me presenting of our game, By The Beat of a Butterfly Wing, starts at around 4:33. Though there are some other really cool games in there, so please take the time check them out (the 2nd half). |
Long Description
All teams at No More Sweden got three (3) inspirational words that they were supposed to let themselves be inspired from. Ours were Steam, Animal and Soup. We only had to use two of those words, so we choose Steam and Animal.
Being a bit of a technical guy, my initial thought was that we could use the idea of steam to make all sorts of funny machines that could be used to built some interesting machines and stuff like that.
Free Stuff / Creative Common License
Being only a gang of programmers, we had the immediate problem of having no easy access to art or sound resources. This was a really good exercise for me, as this is something I also struggle with in may daily work where I work as an indie programmer. I usually find an artist to work with, but it was a really good exercise scouring the web for models, art, textures, etc. Perhaps in the future, I am thinking a combination of those two could be a good possibility (as I would still need someone to help me with general layout, styles and skinning).
We found most of the 3d models on Turbo Squid, the sound effects on the Freesound Project and the music on Dig CC Mixter.
As a fun fact, some people thought the game looked so good, they even asked if we had prepared something from home 
Learning Unity
I am not usually a big fan of middleware, unless it follows the linux philosophy of being separable into small specialized libraries, that only do very specific tasks but do those tasks very well. Why this is, is a discussion for another time, so coming back to Unity the fact that the engine comes so well recommended, combined with the fact that I know at least a few people who work at the company personally, have made me want to look at the engine for a while, and now I just needed an excuse to actually try it out. A game jam was the perfect excuse!
I must say it (ed. Unity!) worked very well for our prototype, and I very quickly got the hang of it. In the beginning we used SVN for storing code and assets, which was a bit of a hassle, but as soon as we changed to using the Unity Asset Server all those kind of problems went away. As a fun fact, I landed a contract job for a game developed with Unity as soon as I came back to Denmark. So, yay to them!
Results
Working on BBBW had three (3) main purposes for me; learning Unity, finding good art / sound resources via public resources and making a decent game. I think the first two goals were reached. I will let you be the judge of the game, though please come back here and leave a comment if you play it .
The small 2 engine propeller plane that flies between Stockholm on the mainland and Visby on Gotland
I just came back from Visy, Gotland in Sweden where I attended the Gotland Game Awards for the fourth year in a row. The award show’s main purpose is to celebrate the hard work of the students, as well as to show off, to the public as well as professionals, the games they have created throughout the year.
There are several things that I think this school is doing right, and that we (in DK) could learn a lot from.
Bringing in the Public
The game exhibition is filled with people from Visby and surrounding area throughout both days, like a mini PAX or E3. Mind you, 95% of the games shown at the exhibition are made by students, and the attendees don’t seem to mind. They just have fun exploring the creative booths, presentations and games. The last 5% of the exhibition is devoted to games made by enthusiasts, like us at the Nordic Game Jam.
People from the local community playing the students' games. So Awesome!
The Award Show
On the last evening there is a huge award show with prizes, speeches, tuxedos, reception with champaign, gigantic fireworks show, etc. As cheesy as it sounds, this actually works quite well. The room is packed with people from Gotland, game professionals, VIPs from the university like the Dean, and so on. The students get to go on stage and receive a prize in front of their peers and get recognition for their hard work and creativity.
Don Geyer, Jasmin Orthbandt and Johan Svahn warming up the room
Nordic Game Jam at GGA
Like last year, two teams from the Nordic Game Jam had been invited to GGA to show off their game at the exhibition, and to participate in the competition. The two teams we brought up there this year, were the teams behind Only One Can Ride The Donkey as well as Monkey Donk.
Jesper and Tim at the Nordic Game Jam booth
Only One Can Ride The Donkey is a fantastic pick-up-and-play three person game, where you have to help eachother fight off an incoming enemy horde. The catch is that in order to win the game only one of you can survive. If two or three people survive, all players loose. This means that you have to find the right times to backstab your allies. Only One Can Ride The Donkey won the participants award at the Nordic Game Jam 2010.
Only One Can Ride The Donkey
Monkey Donk is more of an intellectual game where player one have to figure out, which monkey in a screen otherwise filled with AI-controlled monkeys, is steered by player two. The mission of player two is move around the screen and steal 4 bananas before player one figures out who he is. Simon Bækdahl Nielsen who won the prize as Best New Nordic Talent at the Nordic Game 2010 conference was part of the team who made this game.
Monkey Donk
There were two competitions the teams could compete in; the Nordic Game Jam Award, which one of the two teams would surely win, as well as as the Open & Invitational Award which basically all teams at the exhibition participated in. Monkey Donk deservingly won both categories. If you want to read a small review of the game, I am currently running a small feature describing different games made at the Global Game Jam 2010. Monkey Donk was my first feature.
Simon & Troels accepts the prize for Best Open & Invitational
Thanks go out to Jasmin Orthbandt, Johan Svahn and Peter Stråhle for helping me find the winner of the Nordic Game Jam Award.
Peter Stråhle, Jasmin Orthbandt and Johan Svahn playing Only One Can Ride the Donkey
The Games
Like the three last years, I was part of the jury. My subgroup of the jury was tasked with judging the first year productions. This is something I found quite enjoyable and exciting as part of the task the first year is to create an arcade machine. This means that not only are the students tasked with creating an arcade game, they also have to create a suitable user-interface in the shape of a cabinet with intuitive physical controls. A few special honorable mentions from this year are:
Pirates and Royalist
I really didn’t think much of this game during the presentation, though it actually ended up being my favorite game. The game pitches the players one-against-one ship-against-ship in a death-match like battle for survival. Each ship is controlled(rotated) with a physical rudder, while the cannons are fired, and the sails lowered and raised by pulling ropes on the machine. A large part of the games’ strategy is figuring out how to position yourself in relation to the enemy for a good volley of cannon fire, while lowering and raising the sails at the right moment in order to let the wind carry you away before the enemy can reposition herself and retaliate. The physical arcade interface works very well and adds greatly to the immersion.
The poster for Pirates & Royalists
The game and the arcade machine. Notice the ropes as well as the rudder.
Inside the machine an optical mouse is cleverly used for detecting the rotations of the rudder
Thirsty?
The second game I want to talk about is a clever advergame disguised as an arcade machine. The idea is that if you finish the puzzle game in the machine, then you get a free Vitamin Well drink. This is a very good and clever idea. The puzzles, in this particular game, play well and has interesting physical controls. On the whole I found the game to be a tad on the difficult side, but that is a balancing issue. Nice work guys!
Thirsty? The arcade machine
Hanging Out
Lastly it always fun to come to Visby and GGA to hang out and meet old acquaintances as well as new friends. Gotland is by far my favorite island and I hope to come back many times still.
Location: Manila
Download: Link to game page on globalgamejam.org
Achievements: None chosen
Description
It happens very rarely nowadays, that a game comes out which has a an idea I’ve never seen before. It quite often happens that a game comes out which has a new twist on an existing theme, and is innovative in that way, but it is exceptionally rare that a whole new idea comes out. Crease is one of those games that have very little in common with other games.
The basic idea is that two avatars are attached to opposite ends of a piece of paper. The paper can be folded, but only in pre-designated places. The task then, is to fold the paper in such a way that the two ends of the paper, and thereby the two avatars, meet. Very simple.
As with any of the other games at the Global Game Jam, this game is only a prototype, and therefore the puzzles are quite simple and only show the basic proof of concept. Though, even with only a few folding places to choose from, the proper folding order is not always as obvious as you might think. Try it out!
Taken further by playing a bit more with the mechanics around the idea of folding the paper, as well as adding some cool puzzles, I think this game could easily be taken much further. Congrats to Team Tupi for making such an awesome game!
Location: Copenhagen / The Nordic Game Jam
Download: Link to game page on globalgamejam.org
Achievements: Instant Online Gratification Game, Take Five Game
Description
Largely overlooked at the Nordic Game Jam during the round of presentations, Monkey Donk is one of those games that doesn’t win you over through amazing graphics or stunning technology. Rather it is a game that encourages people to play together and watch other people play.
It is a competitive two-player game, where one player controls a single monkey among a lot of other ai controlled monkeys. The other player takes the role of the zoo keeper who has 5 minutes to find and shoot the false monkey. As fate is, he only has one shot.
The trick for the player controlling the monkey is to keep his movement patterns as close to that of the computer controlled ones as he can, so that the opposing player won’t guess who he is, while at the same time finding and picking up a number of bananas distributed evenly on the playing field.
The idea is quite similar to Chris Hecker’s Spy Party, where in one player takes the role of a sniper who has to guess who is the spy at a cocktail party.
Of course the real fun in these games, are not so much the mechanics themselves, but the social dynamics that arise outside the game, as people start yelling and guessing who is the player controlled character and not. I urge you all to try MonkeyDonk, it is a great game.
I am one of the founders and organizers of the Global Game Jam, which is this fantastic concept, where a of lot of sites across the globe come together to create a single game jam. The jam takes place on the same weekend worldwide. In 2010, we had 138 sites ranging from Argentina and Australia, over France and Israel to Japan and the US all participating in a game jam during the last weekend of January 2010. Nearly 4000 people produced around 900 games during those 46 hours!
Counting the games from 2009, it means that there are now 1200 game prototypes on the global game jam website. Even though we have introduced different search mechanisms, it is still very hard to find your way around the content there. For that reason, I’ve decided to make a GGJ Game Feature on my blog where I select a game from GGJ 2010 to feature on my blog.
I will make an effort to pick games from a wide selection of sites for this feature, which with a bit of luck, will be posted either weekly or bi-weekly.
Theme
The main theme of the Global Game Jam 2010 was deception, so most if not all of the games will incorporate deception into the game concept in some way.
Keynotes
Before rounding off, I just want to talk about the Global Game Jam keynotes. We always have a keynote at the Global Game Jam . After seeing Ste Curran deliver the most fantastic keynote of my life at the Nordic Game Conference 2008, I convinced Susan that Ste should be our keynote for GGJ 2010. You can see his GGJ Keynote below:
Kyle Gabler of 2D Boy made the keynote for the very first Global Game Jam in 2009. His very humorous contribution is embedded below:
I can’t tell you who yet, but we have a real treat and surprise for the GGJ 2011 keynote
I just came back from Nordic Game 2010, where I and the rest of the Nordic Game Jam team had a talk. Besides our own talk, I primarily came back with 3 really good experiences; I am going to talk about 2 of those here; the Indie Night and Kristian Segerstrale’s keynote.
Indie (Night)
I went to the Indie Night at Nordic Game, which was a small pre-event arranged by the Copenhagen Game Collective. I’ve always felt a close spiritual relation to the indie scene, as I do believe that we are exploring a new art form and many of these people take that work very very seriously. Perhaps the best way to describe many of these people, like Cactus, Nifflas, etc, is that they are the auteurs of the game industry, and they do amazingly important work in moving the industry forward.
Kristian Segerstrale
For those of you who may not know who Kristian Segerstrale is, he is one the founders of Glu Mobile as well as Playfish (which was later sold to EA for $250M). Kristian held a brilliant keynote, entitled “Five Lessons for Game Entrepeneurs”. Of course, most of that advice were inspired by his work with social games, and I do actually think he had a lot interesting points. His main points evolved around thinking about games as services and constant data mining what the users are doing.
I believe there is a point that as soon as you start thinking about games as a service, then there is an argument following from that, which includes adapting the game to the consumers and making sure they have a better experience, they try out more features of the games, etc. This is the point, where for the game to succeed, you as the game’s creator must loosen your grip on control and start thinking about the users as co-creators.
Segerstrale vs Indie
Now this may be a false conflict here, but I find both sides of the coin very interesting. On one side, I think many indies represent the auteur product driven viewpoint, while some may say Segerstrale represent the more democractic viewpoint of ‘we give the public what they demand’. The balance of course, in the new world of social games, Facebook, location-based games, etc is to find out if you are listening to your users so much (ie thinking about the money) that you essentially have lost all artistic vision. Of course, some might argue, that as long as people are having fun and enjoying themselves, who cares about your single-minded vision?
Now I only mentioned Segerstrale, because I have seen him speak a few times, and I have been impressed every time. What is really going on here is a conflict between the product driven core definition of a game, and the new social-driven games as a service thinking. A conflict, that Bill Mooney brought to an explosive level with his slightly tactless acceptance speech for the award for Best New Social/Online Game at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards 2010. You can find some interesting musings on it on ZDNet, as well as by Raph Koster and by Josh Sutphin.
My Personal Solution
I have always personally tried to strike balances; I live in a collective, so some might think I have socialist tendencies, but I am really a libertarian at heart. The same goes for games; I strongly believe an artistic vision is needed, but I don’t believe money smells, nor do I believe you sell out just because you carve out a niche with users who hopefully have some of the same likings as you do (Geekstack has similar musings on Zynga here).
My entry for the March 2010 edition of the Experimental Gameplay Project is finally done. It is the first time I ever participate, and I am excited to finally get something out there. Check it out, and please come back here to leave a comment and let me know what you think.
Explanation of the game (also on the game page):
This game is my entry for the March 2010 edition of the Experimental Game Play Project. Music was done by Totally Corny Productions and used here under the Creative Commons license.
My first inclination was to make an action game, a little in the style of Earth is a 3D Planet, where in my version you would have 10 seconds to clear the level or the number of enemies would be doubled. However, thinking that I wanted to try something more experimental, I decided to make a text adventure and and see if it would be possible to transfer that adrenalin filled feeling of time-pressure to the text adventure genre. This is also why the game takes place in the cold; the basic idea is that the player needs to keep moving in order to keep warm. If the player stands still for a certain number of seconds, he dies.
In the beginning the time limit was 10 seconds. However, I quickly raised this to 15 seconds as you don’t need to type much wrong in order for the time to run out. Having a small trial with an external tester, this time has now been raised to 20 seconds
So did I succeed? Not sure, as I don’t think the continuous pressure gives the player enough time to get emotionally vested. Perhaps a more traditional text adventure, with the occassional time limited choice would work better.
- Personal flexibility
- Bigger potential set of collaborators
- More involvement
- Flexible Downtime Costs
- Costs of Living
So, its been a while since my last post, but that is mostly because I am working hard (on this and other things!). I am at a stage in the code, where there is just a lot of grunt work that has to be done.
