lunes, 30 de julio de 2018

ZGBJAM 2018

Wow this one has been really fun! I feel extremely happy about the outcome of this jam! Almost everything in its organization was improvised, but good friends always heed the call :)



We got very different kinds of games: Zalo made a game in which you had to push a ball using a shield, Dani Márquez made a little mini-golf, David Erosa made a mix of basketball and puzzle, Ulises a card based game and Tatos a Downwell demake. Some are more polished than others, but I feel like all of them are great and fun prototypes.

Other friends joined the jam online: Maikel made his game in just 24h. It's simple but it has very nice graphics! Deebrol made an excellent work too with a very polished game. I would have liked to have more devs online, but it's summertime and a very niche engine... so I guess I should be happy for getting eight entries.






My previous experience as a one man band in a game jam using ZGB wasn't very good. I couldn't finish my game and ended extremely stressed and tired. C programming is a bit hard for me and I didn't have much of help, as the rest of the jammers were using Game Maker or Unity3D. In addition, I didn't really have a solid concept for my game...

This time I tried to focus on a simple idea, trying to recycle some code and adding something new to the game. The output has basically been a platformer in which the main character (a ball) is bouncing all the time. I (kind of) completed my game, Dungeon Ball, featuring:
  • good controls
  • good and simple core gameplay
  • four levels (I still have to work on levels a lot)
  • working screen flow (press start, levels, game over, victory, etc.)
  • winning and losing conditions
  • music and sound effects (crappy and fast made, but hey...)
Zalo had to help me with the physics, as I'm not still sure about how to use (unsigned) fixed type variables haha. Using Visual Studio instead of Notepad++ was a huge step ahead too. Viewing the list of parameters for each function is essential.

I guess it's a good time to note down the problems we all had during the development time (and installation time!) and try to improve the wiki, the docs and tutorials to make it friendlier and easier.

It's been an awesome weekend. Thanks everybody for sharing the work and the time! Special thanks to Genera Games for sharing their facilities with us!

martes, 24 de julio de 2018

ZGBJAM Is Coming Next Weekend!

So we've got a little 48h game jam featuring the ZGB engine. Here's the itch.io site with all the rules and resources you need to start making Game Boy games!!

We'll get together on-site with a couple of friends to test what we are able to do in such a short amount of time. I'll be blogging the evolution of the event :)