I haven't read any professional reviews of KoA just yet, but what I've heard via word of mouth is that it's decent yet repetitive. Just curious...

Obviously, I haven't been making huge tweaks to the blogs after the recent change of some enormity, but today I did add one tweak that's been on my mind for a bit: a bar along the top of the page so that it's easy to return to your own profile if you visit a friend's blog. It's something some of you had asked about, as well.

Another change I may implement today is a change to add replies to the "Friends" page, so that it's easier to see discussions friends might be having that you aren't necessarily aware exist. It's likely I'll put that change in place today, perhaps even in the next few minutes. It'll make it easier for more people to join interesting discussions.

This section of the site is obviously still a work in progress. I hope that you're enjoying the streamlined design as much as I am. Thanks for continuing to frequent the site and for posting in your blogs when you have something to share.

Thanks Emp. Well I reckon there'll be next year. The plan for the incomplete 'Unholy' is to finish it off for some event called 'iFest' in April.

I always (as in, both times thus far) enjoy reading about your expliots at Gamejam. Long may it continue!

Maybe you should think about attending one next year, Andrew?

More good news on our game - we received a recommendation on Kotaku:

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/01/you-should-play-these-game-jam-games/

I have to admit I was surprised at this, simply because I thought they might recommend only completed games. But if I hadn't told you what the goal was, and that the game wasn't complete, and you picked it up, you might have been pulled in by the atmos and setup (which has a fairly open feel) and the ghost mechanics, and not even notice that you hadn't worked out what your over-arching goal is.

I found it worth reading through too. Kind of jealous really :). Great that the event grew so much.

Thank you for making it through perhaps the longest blog post on this site :)

Awesome write-up describing what sounds like a wonderful event. Thanks for sharing!

This is a story about team Dusk (which included myself, Wade Clarke) trying to develop the game eventually titled Unholy over 48 hours at the in-Sydney venue of Game Jam 2012, January 27- 29.

The brief of the jam is to form a team on the spot and develop a game from scratch within 48 hours related to a mystery theme which is only revealed when you show up. At the end, industry judges check out the games and dole out praise and prizes. This year's theme was given in the form of a picture, a ring formed by a snake eating its tail. The move from an English word cue (last year's theme was “extinction") to a visual one might have been made to help convey the theme to all participants around the world with equal force, getting rid of the English language issue.

My initial shock this year was at the explosion in attendance. While I guess 40 to 50 people attended last year's Sydney Jam at the Powerhouse Museum, this year more than 100 descended on the new venue of Rosehill Gardens Event Centre, a super high-ceilinged building beside a horse racing course. The jam was facilitated by the presence of the Sydney Gamers League: 350 of its members were having a networked game-a-thon in the Centre alongside the jam. Imagine hundreds of hardcore gamers and computers stacked in aisles for as far as the eye can see, with Modern Warfare 3 and Starcraft glowing on as many monitors.

Initially I was in a team with seven people, amongst them Tim and Jacqui who programmed our team's game Impacts last year. I'd also met Michael at the last jam, and had since done sound and music for his Flash game ZX Space.

Coming up with a game concept

As you've only got 48 hours, the organisers urge you to come up with an idea pretty quickly, then they hold a session where all teams pitch their ideas to each other. Jammers then have the opportunity to change teams if they like a different team's idea better or can find a better fit for their own skill set.

After a lot of frantic riffing on the snake-eats-self theme, our team's ideas for game mechanics fell mostly into the following three areas:

-- Playing a level multiple times and using your corpses as tools to progress through the level
-- Having ghosts of your previous plays help or hinder you on later ones
-- Having a series of characters die and play through the same areas (ala Eternal Darkness)

Over our catered tea (which was hardly stellar, and the first sign of the food hardships which lay ahead) our team split in two when one half came up with a new set of ideas involving a literal interpretation of the snake image; they would make a variation on the classic Snake game in which you don't control the snake but must somehow trick it into eating itself. It was called Ekans. Get it?

I was much more into the idea of making a horror game and doing something with ghosts, but what our two new teams agreed on is that they would share artists. That is, I would do sound and music for both games, and Michael and our new friend Leanne would produce artwork and animation for both games.



Members from both teams


Finalising the concept (OR DID WE?)

The ghost game team – which we called Team Dusk at some point – now consisted of Tim and Jacqui on programming, Michael and Leanne on artwork, Michael on animation and myself on sound and music.

Coming up is what I recall to be our initial game concept. I say recall because tracing the exact origins of ideas is always tricky (who came up with what and when?) and probably even more so over a crazy sleep and food deprived 48-hours.

The game is set in a village. Ghosts/demons are attacking the villagers for some reason. It's dark and scary and visibility is limited. The view is from overhead. You can try to flee the ghosts but inevitably one will get you. At this point, to survive, you need to attack and possess another human. When you're a ghost you have limited time to possess someone or you will die in a Game Over kind of way. To end the demon attack you have to find and put out 6 black candles hidden around the village, which were used by villagers to summon the demons in the first place.

Eating food at Game Jam

Food was sparsely dispensed over the course of the event (a euphemism) and not very good (euphemism). You had to hand in a voucher to get each meal, thus preventing you from stealing an extra two Weet Bix at breakfast, for instance, after realising that your breakfast of only the initial two Weet Bix had actually been a parody of a breakfast.

We had our own tea and coffee supplies in the Jam area, but no milk. The plastic spoons warped when you tried to stir your hot drinks with them. On day three I made an interactive sculpture out of three warped spoons, a coffee lid and a live fly.

The artwork

Leanne drew our cast of villagers with her graphics tablet. Her style is quite manga-ish, which gave the game a Japanese look. We had whittled the cast down to three types: a man, a woman and a little girl. Leanne came up with the man's design very quickly and I was impressed, though I did make jokes that I wasn't sure that men had such fashionable facial hair in whatever time period this game was set in.

Uh, what time period was this game set in?

Our game's background story was still vague on day one. Was this village medieval-rural? 18th century? 19th century? Early 20th century? And where was it? I had kidded that I wasn't going to be policing accurate fashion and grooming for the characters based on when and where we set the game, but I did start thinking about nailing down a setting. It had to make sense that these people were superstitious enough to try solving problems by summoning demons.

Handily, Leanne's design for the little girl had her dragging a teddy bear, which forced my hand. I thought that if it was a genuine teddy bear, the game had to be set after those became popular (post Teddy Roosevelt). Our story was not dissimilar to something Lovecraft might write, so I figured we could set it in Lovecraft country in Lovecraft times. On a piece of paper I wrote "Dunwich, 1924." Then I wrote a succinct introductory story intended to be displayed at the start of the game.

Animation

When Michael wasn't working on the snake graphics for our sister team, he took Leanne's village character artworks and animated them. He also came up with ghost versions for each character, and they all looked really cool. The ghost girl in particular was the kind to scare the crap out of you.

Sound and music Part 1

The first task I set myself was to produce music for team Ekans. One thing I realised about Game Jam last year is that you may have only a few minutes to demonstrate your game to judges and an audience, and you can really increase the value of your presentation with a good in-game soundtrack if one is appropriate.

I asked Dan on the snake team about what kind of music they might like. Their game was now set in an Egyptiany arena and had a crowd cheering on the player who was stuck in the pit with the snake. He suggested something jarring along the lines of the Kirk VS Spock gladiator fight from classic Star Trek. 'Duh duh duhhhh duhhhh duhhhh duhhhh duhhhh DUHHHH DUH DUH DUHHHH DUHHHH!…'

I thought that would be cool and funny and I went back to my laptop fully intending to go in that direction. As often happens in musicmaking, I ended up going not where I had intended to, but liking what happened where I ended up. I dropped in a 4/4 C64-sounding bass riff from Logic's library while experimenting, and that dictated the whole piece, just because I liked what was happening when I mixed it with Egyptian noises. The decision to continue with this piece and not go back to the drawing board was also the kind of time pressurised one you have to make often in Game Jam. I couldn't afford to lose the time I'd already invested in it.

To this track I added liberal doses of vocal yelling from various nations – Bollywood yelps, African chants, that kind of thing – to get a tribal feel happening, though the resulting mishmash was probably completely offensive to all of these cultures. I later pruned back some of the silliness and added my own melodic magic (™) to develop something that I thought would sound quite tense and exciting over the snake-in-the-arena game. When Matt from team Ekans checked it out and described it as "wicked and dark", I thought: "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!"

Programming

I had watched Tim and Jacqui do their programming wizardry last year, so I knew what to expect from them. They sit their computers side-by-side, work on different elements, occasionally merge them, occasionally communicate by ESP and occasionally by Tim raising his voice. Jacqui staves off sleep in general.

The main difference this year was that the process was less inscrutable to the other team members (or at least to me) because the gameplay was less inscrutable. The game we made last year was a high-faluting variation on Life, and there was no time for everyone to discuss every algorithm that was going to go into it. We just had to trust Tim and Jacqui to put it together, and they did. As a result, late iterations of that game kept surprising me with their new behaviours.

This year we had all discussed, argued about and contributed to the design of the game mechanics as a team, so as the code began to become demonstrable, we would look at each version of the game and see the things we'd talked about starting to function.



Screenshot of Unholy


Finalising the concept?

Late on the middle day, Tim told me he wanted to change the game design so that there would be a bunch of scene setting achieved through in-game dialogue before the part where you had to deal with the ghosts. Given the amount of time we'd already spent nutting out a design I thought would work, I was highly resistant to the idea; it threw up lots of new plot and game mechanic questions and contradictions that would all need to be solved, and change the nature of the beast so that you weren't thrown straight into a fearful survival situation, which I felt was a very pure mechanic well suited to the constraints of Game Jam.

We talked about all my concerns at length and were able to come up with answers to most of the new questions. For instance, when was the ghost attack going to occur now? We decided that initially the village could be a safe place and that the ghosts would be outside, but once you went out there (hopefully in response to curiosity piqued by the villagers' dialogue) you'd encounter a ghost and sort of set things off. Something I was adamant about was that ultimately, no place in the game should be safe. I didn't want the player to be able to hide in the village. I wanted the pressure to be on.

Of course what was intriguing about Tim's new idea what the prospect of recording some villager voices. Surely this would be a highly ambitious feature in a game made in 48 hours. Like he later said, “it's something you can brag about." I had also prepared myself technically pre-jam to record some dialogue because Michael had expressed interest in making a game including audio narrative.

I still had some misgivings about the direction change of the game, but since the solutions seemed feasible and the idea of doing dialogue was attractive, I agreed to it. Our challenge/problem now… at 2 AM of the final day, though you'd hardly have known it what with 400+ gamers and coders wide awake and still thrashing about in the building… was to get some people to perform the script Tim had written. We needed lines for the man, the woman and the girl. Cynical readers from Generation X will not be surprised to learn that most of the folks at Game Jam are men, so the first thing we did was approach the only woman who was both visible and awake at that moment, Jenna.

Recording the in-game dialogue

Jenna was famous at last year's jam for having built a robot; that was the interesting fact organisers wrote about her on the getting to know you sheet. We asked her if she wanted to record some lines and it turned out she wasn't interested, though she was encouraging of the idea that we should approach random non-jam gamers in the foyer, saying, "Hey, wanna voice a videogame?" – because she said that would be hilarious.

I can't deny that it might have been, but my sensible side thought we shouldn't. There was the potential for time wasting with people we didn't know and who weren't committed to Game Jam, but potentially a bigger problem was that the single location quiet enough for the recording of dialogue which Tim and I had scouted out and tested was in an unlit brickwork cul-de-sac outside the centre. Frankly, I would have been embarrassed to try dragging people I'd never met before into this dark alley at 2 AM with the promise of voice work in a video game.

So instead we dragged people we knew out there – me, Tim, Dan, Michael and Leanne. Tim's brother Dominic came along just to laugh at us, I think. Jacqui came along but was dead on her feet. We took turns trying different lines from the script, recording into my Macbook which was perched on a recycling bin in the dark. While I have directed actors in the past, I am certainly not one. I think Dan obviously has some performer in him. I don't know if he has any acting experience, but you could believe that each take with him was potentially a different person, one of those people being Dr Evil.

In the dark we ended up missing one of the lines, but otherwise we got everything we needed. I then worked on editing this dialogue into useable takes until 5AM, at which point I broke for a four hour nap. Listening to the recordings vindicated our choice of that quiet cul-de-sac; they proved to be extremely usable in their raw form, with almost no background noise and no need for post production other than level matching. They weren't even recorded with an external mic, just through the air into the Macbook's internal mic.

Having a shower

No showers were available until late on the middle day, at which point you had to book your shower and be marched down into the bowels of the facility if you wanted one. I got to use a shower set aside for female jockeys. I deliberately chose that one because when else does a man get to go into the female jockeys' shower at a race course? Never, that's when!

Sound and music Part 2

I love making Silent Hill-like music, and I also like making dismally sad sounding string music, so on the afternoon of the middle day of the jam I put the two styles together to come up with the in-game soundtrack loop for our ghost game. A low string grinds away beneath a bed of wailing and rattling. A harpsichord-like synth plucks a few notes overhead occasionally, and eventually the violin comes in with the sadness riff. I was extremely pleased with this track.

After the design change to the game involving the addition of dialogue and atmosphere-building in the village, I decided I would make a twin piece of music which would sound similar to the first one, but be the safer "pre ghost attack" version. It uses one of the same strings and some of the same riffs, but contains no supernatural noises and is in danger of being pretty. It reminds me a bit of the town music for Diablo, which probably isn't a surprise because our game has a slightly Diablo feel in the village, and Tim also mentioned the game when trying to describe an aesthetic for the lighting to Leanne.

I also created three soundscapes for what we called Ghost Hell. When you become a ghost, all the sound is blotted out except for a horrible noise from the ghost world, which should repel you and encourage you to try to get out of the ghost world as quickly as possible. I made a soundscape for each of the male, female and girl characters. For the man and woman, I used massively slowed down sounds of anguish and combined them with irritating tones and rattling. In the case of the girl, I slowed down the sound of a bunch of children cheering to about 10%.

Coming up with a freaking name

I wanted to call the game Black Candle but Tim really didn't like that. We thought of going with our team name, Dusk, which seemed evocative and to suggest all those being on the edge of one area (life, ghost life, death) and entering another ideas applicable to the game. But admittedly, there was no dusk in the game, only night. There was also talk of naming the game after the demon you would eventually defeat, but I'm glad the demon was never named or seen properly, and that as a result I never had to argue against this particular naming idea which I disliked intensely! We debated "Possession", but eventually settled on Unholy. Michael wasn't crazy about it, but he was outvoted.

The final product

By the time of the midday judging on day three, the game was about 85% complete in each of the three areas: art, programming and sound. Some sounds hadn't been put in (footsteps for instance) and the audio proximity alarms for the ghosts, and the reaper who kills the ghosts, weren't in either. A really neat addition, however, were the character portraits which appeared whenever you spoke to someone. And thanks to a random name generation library, every character had a unique period name which would appear alongside their portrait. Plus the names changed every time you played! The Japanesey artwork and RPG-ish dialogue really made the thing look Japanese.

The main thing that was missing was the programming for the candles the player is supposed to find to be able to win. In other words, the mechanics were in, but there was no goal. Obviously we still had a lot that we were able to demonstrate to the judges – people wandering the village, giving their dialogue, ghosts wandering around and attacking people, the reaper attacking ghosts (an awesome effect involving screen jitter and a huge black hand reaching from the ground as he comes near - Jacqui has a way with the effects) and the possession mechanic. We had to give our presentation about four times to different judges.

We didn't win any awards after the judging, but I definitely like – and am impressed by – the game we made this year. We do plan to add the candles and tidy up some of the programming and sound issues after Game Jam so that we will have a finished game. Compared to our game last year, Impacts, I'm more impressed with the volume of content we got in this year, especially at the level of quality that we achieved. The entire village map and graphics, including roofs which disappear when you enter the buildings. Three animated characters and their ghost versions. The reaper hand and his special effects. The ghost hell sound effects and a two-piece musical soundtrack, though the second piece wasn't implemented by judging time. We created all this stuff from scratch in 48 hours. Leanne had not worked on a complete game before, and I think secretly she was a bit of a star with the volume of excellent artwork she gave the team. I look forward to seeing and hearing the final iteration of the game.


Download Unholy here (Windows only atm, Mac build coming in future)

Eventually you get to the point where every other puzzle will stump you for a while.

I downloaded Pushmo this afternoon. Now a few hours later, I'm at 4-6 and ready to stop for a bit. I didn't skip any puzzles, so my brain is a bit fried at this point. Getting to the top of the Christmas Tree was quite the ordeal, and there were a few other tough puzzles along the way, as well (the NES controller comes to mind).

MS Word mostly. I use Notepad for small stuff.

I use Microsoft Word and sometimes Open Office. I also write a surprising amount of stuff in regular Notepad if I'm in a rush.

I didn't play much this week. I've been more interested in watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's my first time watching them, ever. So no spoilers. Currently about half way through Season 2.

The Longest Journey

Up to the start of chapter 4. April's just ended up somewhere in her underwear. That's so... not appropriate!

Pullblox (Pushmo)

Up to the Nintendo murals. They're a bit easier than the challenges, and form some interesting pictures of Nintendo characters.

Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

Got lost in the stupid forest near the start of the game. Don't remember what I'm supposed to do. Found an animal who talks about smell and a mushroom that gives off an aroma but I'm damned if I know how to make the two things interract.

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Just landed in the mines section of the lower world. Haven't explored further yet.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D

Got the lens of truth from the well and then I went to Gerudo Valley, but that whole dodge the sentries thing is much harder on a small screen.

I've tried other text editors but can't believe I didn't discover Notepad++ until recently. I really like NoteTab Standard for organizing things that need chapters, but Notepad++ is great for typing one-off stuff like reviews I don't need/want to take too many notes on--it even tracks the # of bytes a file is, and so forth, which is nice when I don't want to bloat a piece of writing too much.

I'd actually heard of Notepad++ before but assumed it was too much like Notepad for some reason. But it's not. After trying a pile of other text editors geared towards HTML coding and such (which I bet some people here might find useful) it took me about fifteen minutes to realize that I'd found something I wanted and probably should've done so years ago.

So what finally made me take the plunge? I got sick of Windows 7's Wordpad asking if I wanted to save a text file as text, because it might lose all the formatting I never put in anyway. I could kill this in XP or even Vista by closing and reopening.

Can't give any non-windows recommendations, but it's great to find a freeware that -works-.

Tomorrow is Australia Day. The day after that it's Global Gamejam time again. I'm going to the Sydney venue where I'll contribute design, audio and music skills to one team as we try to cook up a whole game in 48 hours, Friday-Sunday.

In some ways, what I look forward to the most is the catered meals. They're the most tangible reminder that you don't have to pay attention to anything other than your game-making for 2 days. You don't have to leave the venue and you don't have to cook.

Found Quell. Lovely relaxing puzzle game where you move a water droplet around various boards avoiding spikes.

My gaming habits are all over the place. Also on a Zelda kick.

The Longest Journey

Progress is slowing down. I'm enjoying the story, but I find myself with other things I want to do. I've hacked the archives, given the kid what he wants, gone to see a guy in a hoverchair and after a LOT of dialogue, I was just too weary to go on. I think I'd have preferred this game as a TV series or a book (though graphic novel might have been a better fit). It's really just a visual novel with some puzzles thrown in. It doesn't want to be too challenging, because it doesn't want people to give up and not experience the story.

Dead Rising

The mechanics of this game really bug me. Shooting is incredibly difficult. The one save thing is also a bit weird. Started a new game with old stats, got about an hour in, shot Carlito in the food court gunfight, then died on my way to a save point. Took the disc out and probably won't attempt this one again for a while. I'm a couple of levels up though.

Pullblox (Pushmo)

The puzzle solving continues. Still getting stumped by a lot of them.

Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

Got this on the 3DS virtual console. I'm hoping it's as awesome as I remember. Haven't done much yet, basically gone down to the beach to retrieve my sword.

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Still in the Volcano/Earth Temple, making progress. Got the bomb bag, will probably finish this dungeon the next time I play. Sword fighting with those lizard guys is tough. Fighting two at once almost killed me.

Lucid

Drawing lines is getting a bit dull. I play this when I don't feel like playing anything else.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D

I knew ahead of time I'd be sitting somewhere waiting a while so I put this back in my 3DS. Cleared the water temple. Dark Link was tougher than I remember, but that is a really cool fight. Beat the boss, onto the next segment of the game. This is where it opens up and lets me tackle the next two temples in any order, I think. I'm in the well under the town looking for the lense of truth, and falling into stupid pits all the time.

Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

I bought this on the Wii Virtual Console a while back but hadn't played it. I've finished the game a few times before, but not for a very long time. I played the first 3 day cycle where you're stuck as a Deku kid. It was amazing how much I'd forgotten, like where to find the fairy fragment, where to find the bomber kids when they challenge you to hide and seek. First time I failed, too, since I started the game about a minute before morning. They said I wasn't up to it, but there wasn't even enough in-game time to complete it. That's something I'm remembering about the game - time management. You need to make sure you have enough time to complete certain tasks. But the first cycle is pretty easy. Got the observatory, lovely music there, got the moon tear to trade to the plant near the clocktower, and ended up getting there a full day early, so I danced until dawn with a scarecrow, and then again till night, banked all my rupees and went to visit Skull Kid. SWAMP, MOUNTAIN, OCEAN, CANYON, HURRY, THE FOUR THAT ARE THERE, BRING THEM HERE! If it lets me listen to Oath to Order, then hell yeah!

Mass Effect 2

I bought the Arrival DLC a while back when it was deal of the week. Decided to start it. It's not really that good. I'll still try and finish it before ME3 is out.

Cool. You should post maps of every day for this week, then slow it to once every few days / every week as the game progresses. (Since I imagine after a while, a map a day will become too much).

Why does EmP already have five orbs while everyone else has four?