(Michael Chinen)

BaconGameJam is one of several game jam/rapid development challenges like Ludum Dare and One Game a Month. The last jam took place over the weekend. The theme of “Lights Out” was announced friday night, and teams had 48 hours to design and implement a complete game. I signed up as a team after finding team members via a reddit post I made. The finished game is available here for mac/linux/win/android, including source on my github.

This was my first game jam, so I wanted to shoot for a pretty low target in terms of design. I saw previous jam results where many games were unplayable or not submitted, and this got me worried. Before the jam began I was already leaning towards a just a simple click control and a game mechanic that would wrap around it, because I wanted to be sure to finish.

We brainstormed around the ideas of energy conservation, curfew, die hard, puzzles/game of life, and ultimately ended up designing a runner with a warp between color / grayscale on click. Enemies and good things like bacon would be able to interact with the player on either the color or grayscale background, and as the game progresses, they become less visible from the other warp background.

I had several motivations for joining this game jam. For one, it’s community interaction and as a SOHO whatever it feels good to work with others. Also, working with others is something I want to get better at. Working with a team I am comfortable and productive with is something I dream about. To get there this means I need to work with lots of people.

I also was interested in the challenge aspect. Not the competitive aspect, since this is my first jam, but rather the technical ability to prototype and design rapidly. Sometimes I struggle with longer term projects because I didn’t do enough prototyping and quick development. A 48 hour jam effectively forces you to identify critical design elements and prune the things that aren’t working. This form of greedy design is something that I have too often passed by because it does feel ‘greedy’; but now want to look at it as a tool for overall design rather than a restrictive philosophy.

There was also the technical challenge. These jams tend towards web apps because they are cross platform. However I do desktop and mobile apps, which means compiling to many different platforms and all the headaches that come along with that. However, this is something I want to become more fluent in, since lately I am using cocos2d-x, and the desktop cross platform ability is a major benefit of it that is often unused. BGJ actually gives you an additional day to package your game for additional platforms, but I ended up doing it all before the deadline, compiling a cocos2d-x project to mac/win/linux/android. Fixing cross platform stuff (microsoft’s C compiler oddities or GLSL differences) probably took 30% of the time, which is not so ideal, but now I’ve learned how to make things work with cocos2d-x on each.

Also, I like the idea of being able to learn some new skill with a game jam. I have been wanting to play around with GLSL shaders for a while but despite working with fixed-pipeline OpenGL, I never got around to the programming pipeline. The game jam was a perfect time to dive in. So the game has 4 different shaders from simple greyness/glow shaders, to give a tv-like channel switch effect on the warp, to texture deformation to simulate animation on static sprites. It was pretty educational and I can’t wait to use this on my next iOS game.

Overall, I’m happy with the result. The game is playable and provides some basic fun. Although it’s not going to win any awards, I finished it, and I have a solid point of reference for what I can do in 48 hours for my next jam or prototype. I’m glad I worked on it as a team because the art (by William Mckee) and music (by Grant Matthews) make the game experience much more pleasant, and it was great to toss around ideas and get excited with real people. This was a really good refresher that has given me some new energy and perspective on my current projects too. Looking forward to the next one. If I have time later maybe I’ll do a post moretem on the cocos2d-x/C++ source/technical details and pitfall avoidance strategies I used, but if you’re interested in cocos2d-x alone maybe take a look at the github.