ith the Global Game Jam 2011 still fresh in my memory, I wanted to write about making A-Pun-Calypse with Epic Game Time.

Global Game Jam 2011

The Global Game Jam is the world’s largest game jam where teams from all over the world try to make a game in 48 hours. This year, over 6500 jammers created almost 1500 games. I’ve been doing these since the first one in 2009 with essentially the same team. Our programmers this year were Nick McClay and Matt DeLucas, and Brandon Bittner and I were the artists. We usually end up picking different team names each year so this year we went with Epic Game Time as an homage to the excellent YouTube group, Epic Meal Time. Also, as a rule, we tend not to bring in any game ideas ahead of time and opt to create a game around the year’s theme. The site chosen to hold the Pittsburgh event was the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (my alma mater), right in the heart of downtown.

The Fake Pitch

At 5pm all the jammers at the Pittsburgh site were rounded up to watch the keynote followed by a 20 minute brainstorm session. The keynote video unveiled the theme of the weekend, Extinction. Everyone was asked to write one sentence synopsis of their extinction-themed game then give an elevator pitch to the group of over 80. My team didn’t have anything ready because we spent the entire 20 minutes installing anti-virus software on each other’s machines, so instead of writing a sentence, I drew this:

Dinosaurs Shooting Plague Bullets

The pitch presented the idea that Plague Wars had been going on between the dinosaurs for years. As if plague bullets and climate change weren’t enough, a nuclear asteroid is hurtling towards the planet, which will all but guarantee its destruction.

Brainstorming

Our team started the way anyone else would on a time crunch: we went to the bar. There, we began brainstorming in earnest. One of the first ideas we came up with was to use Kinetic Typography as a visual style and game mechanic. The game would animate and narrate quotes about the end of the world and extinction. We spent a while brainstorming on how we could use the Kinetic Typography theme but we couldn’t figure out a mechanic. Would it be a rhythm game where the player would make the video? It would be a nice reward to the player to see the playback from a level. Would the animation play without player control and they would have to keep up? We discussed typing mechanics similar to what you’d see on those teach yourself to type games.

Another idea we came up with involved growing a colony of cells surrounded by competing cells. There was a root cell that you could pivot a cursor around, and the player would control the direction of growth, while starving out competing cells in the level. It was around midnight at this point, and we weren’t any closer to deciding on a game idea.

We were sitting around the table in a brooding silence when Brandon looked up at our pitch drawing and joked, “We should just make Dino-pocalypse”

Dino-Pocalyse

At around midnight, a full 7 hours in, we started making Dino-pocalypse. We would take every apocalypse cliché and meme and squeeze it into this game. I figured if we pushed the clichés far enough, we would pass the point of being unoriginal and wind up on the other side of originality. If not, we’d have fun making a game.

Anyone who is friends with Matt DeLucas knows that he is a purveyor of puns. He came up with the name A-PUN-Calypse. The idea for A-PUN-Calypse was to create a minigame collection of 4 extinction-themed games. Making one game during a 48 hour period is hard enough; we were making 4! The platform of choice was Flash because Nick and Matt were very comfortable with ActionScript and it would allow us to create art relatively quickly.

We quickly brainstormed the 4 mini-games. The obvious choice for one game was Dino-Pocalyse (which became Dino-geddon). Brandon created some excellent concept art of the T-Rex firing the minigun:

T-Rex Firing a Mingun

This game was about spamming as many bullets as possible on screen against as many enemies as possible. The player adds points to their score for every bullet fired.

The next game was ARMageddon. I decided we should just throw an arm in there and call it a day. This game was about our own current extinction event. You smash the carbon spewing power plants while trying to keep those windmills spinning.

ARMageddon

The third game we came up with was Ex-Stink-tion. This game was going to be based off the classic arcade title, SnapJack, which Matt has wanted to replicate for years. Apparently he holds the second highest score in the world on this game. Matt also came up with an awful story where the player would collect two of every type of smell with Nose Ark.

The last game was created at the last minute by Nick. I interpreted LOL-Ocaust as a game that makes spending any time on the Internet a metaphor for Nuclear Holocaust. In this game you would avoid getting blown up by internet shenanigans.

Production

At midnight on Friday, we were interrupted by the sound of marching. The Pittsburgh site volunteers were announcing the arrival of pancakes and brownies. Two of the volunteers dressed up as the GGJ mascots and marched from floor to floor of AIP to announce the midnight snack.

These guys give 110%

It was around 1-2am on in the morning when we finally got cranking. The team split the work right down the middle. Nick and Brandon were on Dino-geddon while Matt and I tackled ARMageddon.
The last mechanic to be decided on was an overworld for the minigames based on stuff I’d seen with circular panoramas. When Matt first got it implemented it spun way, way too fast; 30,000 RPMs fast. Also, the placeholder art looked like the spinner from twister. It reminded us of a very confusing game show. This ended up setting the pace of the games and gave it the “wheel of fortune” feel.

By noon the next day most of the art was completed for the first two games and work was in progress on the next two games. Matt had started on the mechanics for ExStinktion while Nick whipped out the prototype for LOL-Ocaust. Our looming deadline was the big playtest occurring at 6pm that night.

This is where a bunch of features were cut to meet the playtest deadline. A lot of these would have extended the rather shallow mechanics in each game. In DinoGeddon, we wanted to have other types of dinosaurs that fired back. We also wanted to have background animations of Nuclear Asteroids falling from the sky and detonating in mushroom clouds. We wanted to have multiple building types in ARMageddon besides just the factory and the windmill. Matt ended up just mirroring the factory asset and requiring two hits to flatten it.

Brandon, who is a much faster 2D artist than I am, managed to finish most of the art for both Dino-geddon and ExStinktion in the time it took me to finish ARMageddon. Matt was able to get the overworld system working properly so it switched between the games and paused them when not in play. 6PM rolled around and it was playtest time. This was actually the first time any of us had seen all the games working together and the first time I had played some of them.

To be honest, when I saw our game in action, I had no idea what was going on. I saw the spinning wheel doing 360′s several times a frame, games were starting and stopping seemingly randomly and a lot of art was missing. There was almost no feedback to what was going on. I decided to let Nick explain to the playtesters how the game was supposed to work and went around to check out the other teams’ progress.

My favorites that night:

Hydraman
March of Matryoshkas
All Aboard

Hurry Up and Finish Already

After the 6pm playtest, we took all valuable feedback we had meticulously gathered and went to the bar again. Most of the games were working in some way and you could play it from start to finish. The problem was, there wasn’t a lot of feedback telling the player what was going on. We made a list of action items for when we got back to AIP. Brandon was tasked with making the level selector and all the screens (title screen, instruction screens, lose screens, etc…). Nick and Matt were going to get the Level Selector working perfectly and tweak the games based on player feedback. I would switch from doing art to sound effects and music. With that meeting concluded, we wondered back downtown to put the finishing touches on the game.

I started thinking about what music would fit the tone of each game. I also had a secondary goal of using Creative Commons materials for the audio. Here’s how the thought process went:

Since the hammer in ARM-Ageddon was pretty much stolen from the communist hammer and sickle, I thought it would be fitting to have an old soviet march as the music. Plus, those marches all belong to the people! (are public domain). For Dino-Geddon, I wanted something with a double-pedal bass drum to match the tempo of the minigun. I found a short song called “Power of the Sword” by this gay-pride metal band, NanowarR (what a combo!) I couldn’t really nail a tone for LOL-Ocaust so I opted for some unassuming ambient electronica by Zeropage. Finally, with Ex-Stinktion, I wanted to do something special. I thought it would be funny if all the effects were produced by the nose and mouth. Nick suggested we stand outside in the cold for a few minutes, then hit up the recording booth and capture all the sniffing, snorting, grossness. For the music, Matt “volunteered” his voice and I created the chiptune baseline with pxtone.

exStinktion Theme Song

The sound effects were created with clips from the freesound project which were then mixed, prodded and processed until they had the right amount of punch. The last piece of audio to be implemented was the amazing menu music that I pulled from a 70′s gameshow I’d never heard of called Concentration.

It was close to 1pm on Sunday when the last piece of content was implemented into the game. We had a little less than 2 hours to finish up and submit it for judging. Everyone downed an extra cup of coffee, took an aspirin, and cranked out the final tweaks we needed to finish.

Judge, Judy, and Executioner

At 3pm, it was pencils down. Everyone submitted their games, and headed down for the final presentations and judging. In the student lounge of the Art Institute, all the teams got together along with a special panel of judges:

• MK Haley, Associate Executive Producer of the Entertainment Technology Center
• Christine Bethea, Director of the Geek Art/Green Innovators Festival
• George Sebolt, President of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh

I wouldn’t call our game innovative; there were a lot of games that did some really creative things with the theme and the achievements, but I have to say the response we got from people playing our game for the first time was super rewarding. It was awesome to see the look of joy on the players’ faces when the wheel was spun and the first game started. Some people broke out laughing when they saw the T-Rex or heard Matt’s “beautiful” singing — or maybe it was just the sleep deprivation.

I got to check out more games in their completed state. Amazingly, 19 teams at the Pittsburgh site submitted 19 playable games. My favorites from that play session:

Here Comes the Sun
Shoot the Moon
Menagerie should win the award for “best game that was way too ambitious”.

Epilogue

What’s next? There are no future plans yet. I’d love to get the team back together and create a final game that we could post to a portal, or release on a mobile platform. There would have to be a few improvements:

• More games – our four games would get monotonous after a while.
• An overarching story – this would unify the games better.
• More player feedback – more special effects, popups, and audio. The player need to know when he’s done something correctly.
• Analytics – we could use these to figure out what works and what doesn’t, as well as create leaderboards and acheivments.
• New theme song – unfortunately, NBC Universal owns the copyright to Concentration, so we would have to create a new song for the main menu.
• Credit the authors of creative commons assets – support the creative commons initiative. This took a back seat in order to rush the game out the door.
• Take more pictures! – They tell better stories than really long blog posts.

The Global Game Jam, as always, was a blast. After beating ourselves up in trying to be clever with a mechanic, we just decided to have as much fun as possible making our game. I hope that shows when people play it. Game jams are a great, no pressure way to add games to your portfolio. You walk in with nothing and in a single weekend you have a finished game, all while meeting a lot of cool new people. They’re just this big concentrated mass of talent that you don’t find in many other events.

Our final game can be played on Nick’s site: http://www.nicholasmcclay.com/ggj2011/Apuncolypse.html or you can download it from the GGJ page: http://globalgamejam.org/2011/apuncolypse

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I just removed the logic that checked category and everything works wonderfully now.

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Update:
I just noticed this line on the graphpaper press changelog

“In single.php: replaced is_category with in_category for sidebar conditional.

January 7, 2011 / revision 1548 / rick”

Appearantly, this didn’t get into the version I downloaded Monday.

Changing:

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to:

<!--?php if(in_category($blog_ID)) { comments_template(); } ?-->

Fixed commenting issues.

You can play it here: www.globalgamejam.org/2011/apuncolypse

Here’s what people have to say about it:

“Monty python clever. Really sweet fx, fun fast gameplay with quick rounds that gave player a nice sense of accomplishment.  Beautiful graphics. Self-referential achievement.”
~MK Haley

Short Introduction:
A world of extinction… and puns… about extinction. A collection of 4 minigames where the only one in danger of extinction is you!
Platform/System:
Windows
Mac OS X+
Web standard (Html5, Java, JavaScript, Flash)

Credits
Nicholas McClay – Programming
Matthew Delucas – Programming / Puns
Brandon Bittner – Art
Dan Dwire – Art / Audio

Please leave a comment on the Global Game Jam page.