Meine Soup

Game Jam!

“Occupy” is the given theme for the super game dev weekend Game Jam in Vienna’s Metalab.

The task is to create a game until sunday evening. It does not have to be a computer game, but it should include somehow the word “occupy”.

There is even a symbolic prize to win, and participants can take their work to the coming “ludum dare” game programming event.

Last year, i made an somewhat boring, but working game called Schwarzweiss using python & pygame:

simultan turn based

This year, i am not sure that i will even finish a playable game, but i have a very fix idea in my head: i want to do some turn-based tactical game with simultan turn-based system: each turn has a planning phase and a execution phase. Both sides give orders in the planning phase and see the outcome of this orders in the excution phase. Some of my favorite games use this method, like the (older) Combat mission games or the newer indy game “Frozen Synapse“

card game

Yesterday, i played with some other dudes in the metalab a card (!) game with the aim to helping the creative game creating process to … flow. It somehow worked. The card game was rather complicated, 8 players were divided in 2 teams and had to draw cards. The card had little symbols on it like “Str”, “Dex”, “Wis” and pictogramms indicating gender, time (future, past, present), lifeform (robot, humanoid), and weight/height. After much discussing about what cards to draw most frequent value of all cards was taken to describe out game’s hero.

Our team ended up with a humanoid, strong and wise but incredible short female nomadic character from the past. We had to imagine some details and ended up with Steffi, the time-travelling, undead zombie dwarfen partygirl from the past. She is rather popular, chills out during daytime in a coffin filled with vodka (to conserve the body), has several lifetimes long experiences of party going (what she does each night) and therefore developed limited Fortune-telling abilities. For example, she can correctly divine when a party host will run out of drinks or that angry neighbors will call the police to end a loud party. She “dislike” police and other party-ending forces.

The other group come up with Alf from the future, an also somewhat humanoid, street fighting social engineer who loves pizza and pepper spray. He was later pictured as having the upper body of Alf and the lower torso of Jabba the Hud and use a pizza to shield his eyes from pepper spray.

The next task was for each player to draw (using real paper and real pencils) the main character and the ohter group had to choose the best drawing. Then we were dismissed to create a game concept including both main characters. To help, the cards had big pictures of game concepts like “manage”, “defense”, “duel”, “Betray” etc.

At this time i left Metalab to visit a lecture subotron lecture about game addiction from Dr. Mark Griffiths in Viennas Museumsquartier.

So i missed the final game concept presentations and have only a rather vague idea of what i will do during the game jam. However i found out that i liked the card game and the get-an-idea-and-present-it process of game jams very much.

please flattr: