MolyJam

So MolyJam is over (or at least nearly over) so here is a thread talking specificlly on peoples experiences with it and what they thought of the entire weekend and the final games.

You can go to whatwouldmolydeux.com to check out the games (with more likely to be uploaded in the next few days after they get the uploading problem fixed).

I have to say the games that came out of this have been much better than I was expecting, and loved how people with the same tweet concepts still had massively different games.

P.S. Do you guys want to see them do this kind of stuff again?

Edit------

I will be adding more periodically as I see them but here are some articles and coverage of the event so far:

Rock Paper Shotgun going through some of the submissions.

G4 covering the build-up and LA event.

Joystiq gives two articles: one on the event as a whole, and one specifically on the game"Friends 'til the End" (which you can try out for yourselfhere)

Yes, it was awesome. I only saw the SF one, they had great games all around and a chat with bad puns!

The MolyJam was an absolute delight and I am looking forward to next year!

I watched the Los Angeles stream for all three days, and then I watched the presentations at Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland. It was a fantastic time. LA really interacted with the spectating audience and had some cool games, and while SF had a bit less interaction, they had a ton of cool and puntastic games to demo. :)

In honor of the Game Jam, I made this image based on Molydeux's tweet about a game where a pigeon must rush to stop sad businessmen from killing themselves.

@Coafi: Those puns man haha. Were you there for all of it over the 2 days or just the presentation part?

@Dixavd: I was there mostly for the presentations and I was there yesterday too for an hour and half or so.

@TruthTellah: Yeah it was awesome - I was the opposite, just saw the LA presentation and was at the SF live stream for nearly the entire weekend and it was amazing being able to speak to Patrick and the devs throughout that. LA's presentation was amazing though.

And there were so many of those pigeon games lol (with them actually being quite varied oddly)

@Coafi: Which game stood out for you the most?

@Dixavd: Wow, it's really hard to chose, I don't remember a lot of their names, but I liked Tetris/Pong, the one where it kept raining death, the invisible walls one, the one with the bear hugging the astronauts. I honestly liked most of them except the one with the Molydudes (Populous, with the cloud perspective), that one was a mess.

@Coafi: Yeah they were all pretty stellar. I liked the pong/tetris one a lot too - probably my favourite game I saw from all the stuff I got to see what a German one where you have the crying baby that glows but only as you make sound - but enemies hear you and shoot the baby.... it was extremely creepy but asthetically it was like being inside the animus from assassin's creed.

I spent a bit (i.e. too much) of today playing some of the submitted games on the site. Some of them are actually pretty cool! I especially liked http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=5, http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=12, and http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=29. But mad props to everyone!

And looking over the site to find those links, I realized that there are a bunch of new ones that I hadn't seen yet. If only I didn't have so much work that I should be doing right now...

I really liked the Nebular Hero (I think that's the name), where the instructions unlock after you actually beat the game for the first time. And each tutorial you unlock and follow, more of them get unlocked.

Lol it's silly, but it's great how there was surprisingly a fair amount of stuff to do outside of the platforming gameplay that was initially introduced. And of course, that "true" ending was an emotional feat. :P

Definitely can't wait for next year's Molyjam, had fun watching everyone's games.

@tsiro: My friend made Italian Rocket Riders! Thought that name sounded familiar...

@Zero_: Oh man, that's awesome! That game is crazy and mysteriously fun. I ended up playing round with a friend of mine, and we had a great time.

Poor children...

Thank you for watching and playing guys. That was a blast. I'm so tired.

It's amazing how, with so many unique and original ideas to work from, nearly every game is boring and stale as hell. I know we can't expect much from 48 hours of work, but the lack of creation in these games seems to do a great disservice to the intention and inspiration of the project.

@patrickklepek: You did a great job as MC, Patrick! And Anna was great, as well. MolyJamSF was aided quite a bit by your presence. The other MolyJams around the world were awesome, too, and Los Angeles was my favorite. Definitely worth everyone's time to check out. And the spectator interaction throughout the weekend was stellar and really helped many of us who couldn't go to one of the big events feel like we were a part of it. :)

I am already looking forward to next year. Hoping I can go out to one of the big gatherings.

You helped make a beautiful thing happen, Patrick. Thanks.

Great weekend, I managed to watch some of the streams for the intros/talks and bumbled through an entry of my own. Great to get some goal oriented work done in Unity and once I've got some spare time I'm sure I'll go back and flesh out that concept into a real game (I think it's a fun take on a stealth puzzle idea, rather than avoid enemies you have to get amongst them to hug them to fill your quote and calm them down with the added wrinkle of them being 'alerted' by each other to case some chaos). There might even be a way to port the controls to Android (Unity is rather ace with web/Win32/OS X/Android/iOS compiles from the same sources) if the final game turns out to be a lot of fun.

Obviously it was good to see how far I could and couldn't get in various direction (no Pro license = pathfinding was possibly going to be hard, switched off for what I submitted because it basically meant AIs would kill themself getting frustrated at being unable to navigate) with the very short timer. In the future I'd probably make sure to clear my weekend plans so I could dedicate more time to it. It was worth it for finding this script (AutoSave for the Unity Editor) after a crash ate a few hours of progress and taught me Unity doesn't autosave or create temp files by default. Also, I learnt how to get past the "The file 'none' is corrupted! Remove it and launch unity again!" error in the web player build process (play with the mesh import settings until it works) and general 'how to use Unity' stuff like where the web player dumps the log files and what it contains.

And in the future I'll have some generic scripts for how to do basic things (and understanding of more of the provided scripts and structure) and knowledge of the right way to get things working to actually work quickly (or at least faster than my normal pace). I'd say the time pressure and knowing everyone is under the same constraint is a great factor in these Jams. This was the first time I've used Unity for one (previous attempts at rolling my own engine during the timespan or using a basic OGL wrapped API have shown you have to be really good and fast to get anything worthwhile done - I'm not that fast) and I think it helped show me where I'd like to go with Unity in the future and some fun things (I've had a couple of months doing a few things playing around with Unity just to feel it out but rather unguided previously so I wasn't starting in completely foreign ground - video tutorials are a great way to get a 101 for a tool). Being able to upload a few 100KB of plug-in and have the game work on the web is great. At some point I've got to sit down with UDK and see if I can grok that as another great free tool (been quite a few years since I last built anything in Unreal tech, but at least I know a lot more about what I'm doing than when I first played around with the partial source release of UT a decade ago).

Many thanks to everyone involved with organising and inspiring this. If anyone is considering taking part in a future Jam, go for it, what's the worst that can happen? Just have some fun and see what you can build, worst case you'll spend a weekend learning how not to do something so next time you can build better and smarter...

@James_Giant_Peach said:

It's amazing how, with so many unique and original ideas to work from, nearly every game is boring and stale as hell. I know we can't expect much from 48 hours of work, but the lack of creation in these games seems to do a great disservice to the intention and inspiration of the project.

Thanks for the feedback, which game did you build in the 48 hours* as a shining beacon to the rest of us for what can be done?

* For context, as a 1 person team, that's about 0.00034% of the man-days of a project like Epic Mickey 2 (assuming a 2 year full production cycle, at worst that's an order of magnitude wrong and so it's actually 0.003% man-days), which is a good scale to set expectations with.

I really want to try some of those games. Probably the first thing I'll do once I get home. This was a great idea.

@James_Giant_Peach said:

It's amazing how, with so many unique and original ideas to work from, nearly every game is boring and stale as hell. I know we can't expect much from 48 hours of work, but the lack of creation in these games seems to do a great disservice to the intention and inspiration of the project.

It's understandable. Keep in mind - the whole premise of MolyJam really, is to poke fun at game ideas that are quite honestly pretty stupid - that's the whole premise of Molydeux. So for a polished game to run with one of these crazy concepts and still say fresh is really difficult. Other game jams that go for 48 hours produce games that are high quality (for the given time).

Here's my entry: http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=51 My first game so be gentle :P

I was at the Brighton 'Jam and had an amazing time! We cycled between streams of the other events on our projector; It was a surreal experience knowing that we were all aspiring to roughly the same goal. I actually heard that our stream was on on the big screen in LA, can anyone that was there confirm or deny?

Sounds like our stream cut out just in time for presentations unfortunately but some of the games have found their way onto the upload site (shout outs to "Murdoor", "Six" and "Hugbot's Interactive Lovin'").

As for me, it was an honour to work with some genuinely talented people to create a short game experience. I was responsible for the art and animation in "Kite". Our efforts got us the crowd-voted "Most Emotional Game" Award and a sweet copy of "Magic Carpet" for the PC!

I'm going to try to go through and play each and every game before it gets too crazy (the list has a bunch of duplicates which seems a bit dodgy) and give props to those that really deserve it. I can't express how much fun it was, nor how thankful I am that whole thing came to be at all. If another molyjam comes around next year I will gleefully participate once more!

Loved participating and I sure hope there is another one! My game is called imagine and it's on the molyjam archive, only the second game I've ever made

@Tamaster92: Did you come along to the presentation? I might not have known it was you if you did!

@CabbageHat: The duplicates are from last night (#50s onwards) where the website was half-down so submissions looked like they failed (they actually published the details but failed for attachments - there are probably a few submissions where there are no images or files for any of the copies generated). Some people have been back and uploaded their files and flagged their duplicates 'to be deleted' (by renaming them to 'duplicate' or 'delete' etc and then the website maintainer is going through and culling them) so it should all get cleaned up soonish.

@Shivoa: Ah right, I thought it might be something technical. That website has been under a heck of a lot of strain! Thanks for the confirmation though, it'll be good to see the definitive list once everyone has uploaded their games!

It was pretty awesome. I was enthralled by this whole event from beginning to end. Just trying to explain it non-gamers was fun as hell. "So there's this twitter based off a....."

What I would love to see next, is a democratically decided game or idea that each of the jammers can work on a specific part of. Looking at the creative an innovative ideas that were brainstormed over the weekend makes me salivate at the prospect of having all those people united working on one single project. Maybe you could have something where one weekend one city gets all the project files and they do a jam over the weekend and then they send it to the next city, so on and so forth. So let's say in a year we have a crazy awesome indie developed title that has spanned the globe! Think about it everyone uniting! It will be the weirdest and awesomest community driven game to reach everyone.

Oh and mad props to the bear hugging game that had first, second, and third person. That is just f-ing genius. ^^

@Butler said:

What I would love to see next, is a democratically decided game or idea that each of the jammers can work on a specific part of. Looking at the creative an innovative ideas that were brainstormed over the weekend makes me salivate at the prospect of having all those people united working on one single project. Maybe you could have something where one weekend one city gets all the project files and they do a jam over the weekend and then they send it to the next city, so on and so forth. So let's say in a year we have a crazy awesome indie developed title that has spanned the globe! Think about it everyone uniting! It will be the weirdest and awesomest community driven game to reach everyone.

Yeah, I would like to see something like that. I can't remember which company it is but there is one who takes one weekend out of the year and allows people to develop anything they want together for it (with all the resources of a big game) which they then show at the end of it - some of these things have turned into full-on releases so it would be pretty cool to see that in a public space with people of massively different backgrounds and ideas.

@tsiro said:

And looking over the site to find those links, I realized that there are a bunch of new ones that I hadn't seen yet. If only I didn't have so much work that I should be doing right now...

Since undoubtedly it will take a day or two to upload all of them from every event and remove all of the dupilactes from the site, probably if you do it after you finish your work (or at the weekend or something) then you will have even more games to play (and even more of your time leached away).

@Shivoa: That info could be somewhat useful for me - and your post (Along with the whole MolyJam thing) has sot of got me pumped to try and make my own game. I am thinking of possibly going into game design after my exams are over so I probably should try out some stuff with some engines. So when I have time I will check out Unity and play around with stuff to see what I can do.

To @Finstern: @Shivoa: @tsiro: @CabbageHat: I will definitely check out your games and suggestions when I get the time - thanks for mentioning them.

@patrickklepek said:

Thank you for watching and playing guys. That was a blast. I'm so tired.

And thank you Trick for putting on an amazing show at San Francisco along with Anna (and dealing with people like me in the chat). It was a blast to watch too.

Definitely do this again sometime.

Love your pigeon concept art TruthTellah... I made a pigeon game that has similar mechanics to "Crazy Taxi".

http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=97

Overall I really enjoyed the whole Jam idea, first time I have taken part in an indie gamedev like this... look forward to doing it again in the future! :)

I'm curious as to why CC licences were used for software. (which is not recommended)

If I understand correctly, no free software came out of Molyjam because of this, which is a shame.

@predator: It was a compiled submission system so the CC licenses are more about the assets (and any consideration of the whole as a singular work of art). By making a choice of CC licenses people could include work (such as music, textures, models, and so on) that were already out there but restricted by the -SA condition (without any concern of the remix nature of assembling a game from assets). Lots of quick work can use assets like that, which gets round both talent and time restrictions and are normally credited.

No free software was forced to come out of MolyJam, any of the individual games may be released by their authors as free software under any license they wish with a source release of their own (some may have already done so as part of their submission zip); in fact some may have had to do so to comply with the license for the code they included in their project. While the CC licenses are not recommended for software (and as this was a compiled submission process then that gets all kinds of complicated, most of the binary I submitted is Unity and possibly .Net code and not my own because I used that engine. Is that included in any way in whatever license I release the whole project as? this stuff is far more complicated than the CC vs code-focussed free licences) the game as a whole is flagged under that umbrella. It's not ideal, but this wasn't a source code release Jam so the CC license was a good fit and made everything easy for everyone involved without a headache.

Anyone else getting virus threats when downloading certain games? Wish I didn't have to download them and could just play them on a browser. Other than that my favorite is the bird suicide one. Don't know what it's called, but it involves a bird giving a dude a gun.

Here's our entry from Seattle. It's my first game jam and first game.

PC: http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=189

OSX: http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=198

It was an awesome experience. I made a bunch of friends and had a ton of fun. I worked on Art and Music with one other programmer. I would totally do something like this again. The programmer and I will continue to stay in touch to further polish the game and possibly work on another project. I didn't know what to expect out of just our 2 person team, but I'm incredibly happy and proud of what we made. It's super fun and ridiculous. There is a "Heaven" ending which no-one has seen yet. Anyone up for the challenge? I would love to see a youtube 'perfect' playthrough!

Please check it out guys!!

Thanks!

PS you need the latest JRE on PC to run it

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre-7u3-download-1501631.html

I think the organizers did a great job in certain locations for this too. The fact that most places had live streaming and chat, etc up and running was great.

It kind of made it feel like a real cohesive community, despite that every was in different world locations.

Plus some of the stuff to come out of this are great, so nice to have many talent people working for the same cause. :)

I watched the San Francisco presentations last night and it was incredible. Immense props to everyone involved.

I gotta give a shout out to secret dad. There were many other really cool games as well, and I applaud everyone involved.

So I assume that this was really small and nothing particularly interesting came out of it given that no one covered it? Even Giant Bomb?

All I've seen are a few thread topics here, but I assume there will be an article about it on the site at some point.

Honestly though, was this just a non-event?

This was an informative weekend. Hopefully there will be another next year, that I'll be able to participate in. This one would have made no sense to me as I just started college for programming, and only had english classes so far. I watched mostly the SF stream, and both Anna and Patrick were excellent hosts. They kept entertaining the chat and passing on our chat room hi jinks to those in the room. Bill Kiley's music was always awesome. All the games I watched the presentations for looked amazing. Good job to all that were involved.

@BrockNRolla said:

So I assume that this was really small and nothing particularly interesting came out of it given that no one covered it? Even Giant Bomb?

All I've seen are a few thread topics here, but I assume there will be an article about it on the site at some point.

Honestly though, was this just a non-event?

I wouldn't argue it was big but it was actually bigger than most game jams as far as I can tell. It wasn't really an audience event anyway (even though they had live streams at many of the events around the world) and was more for indie developers and amature creators to network, try new things and have fun making a one-off project.

Some numbers if you are interested: there were 31 events listed around the world in about 11 countries. There are over 250 game submissions (with some probably requiring to be deleted as duplicates but more still needing to be uploaded). Plus a couple people got jobs out of it and it was definitely a success at networking and letting indie developers meet others near them.

It wasn't big enough that it really needs a massive news reporting on it (although I do know tha Giantbomb is covering the SF one and G4 covered the LA one) but it was still quite amazing how big it escalated to.

(You also have to remember that it was over the weekend when all focus will be on April Fool's and most game news companies don't actually work on weekends). Undoubtedly it will be mentioned on the Bombcast as well.

@Dixavd said:

@BrockNRolla said:

So I assume that this was really small and nothing particularly interesting came out of it given that no one covered it? Even Giant Bomb?

All I've seen are a few thread topics here, but I assume there will be an article about it on the site at some point.

Honestly though, was this just a non-event?

I wouldn't argue it was big but it was actually bigger than most game jams as far as I can tell. It wasn't really an audience event anyway (even though they had live streams at many of the events around the world) and was more for indie developers and amature creators to network, try new things and have fun making a one-off project.

Some numbers if you are interested: there were 31 events listed around the world in about 11 countries. There are over 250 game submissions (with some probably requiring to be deleted as duplicates but more still needing to be uploaded). Plus a couple people got jobs out of it and it was definitely a success at networking and letting indie developers meet others near them.

It wasn't big enough that it really needs a massive news reporting on it (although I do know tha Giantbomb is covering the SF one and G4 covered the LA one) but it was still quite amazing how big it escalated to.

(You also have to remember that it was over the weekend when all focus will be on April Fool's and most game news companies don't actually work on weekends). Undoubtedly it will be mentioned on the Bombcast as well.

You've multiplied my knowledge of the event ten-fold. I would have been interested but the lack of coverage led me to forget about the event entirely.

@BrockNRolla: Here's some coverage of it by Rock Paper Shotgunas they go through the submission (with suppossedly more articles on the way).

Hello folks. This is my first post on the GB boards. Here's the game I helped make:

The Last Friendship

http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=200

We plan on polishing it a bit more, as some things still need tweaking or fixing, but this is essentially the game idea we cooked up in our heads Friday night. With another day or two of work, it will be even better.

I'm glad to see some other Molyjammers here. I was part of a four person team here in Seattle. We were not at the Seattle Molyjam headquarters, though, since two of our team members flew in from out of town (LA and SF) and got in late Friday night. The rest of the team was comprised of myself and my room mate, and we decided it would be easiest to hunker down in our house to make our game.

We spent a few hours late Friday and into Saturday discussing ideas and trying to sort out which one we liked the most. Saturday was a very long day, but by the end we had about 85% of what would be in the final game. Sunday was mostly just polishing, working out the game play, and making sure you could install and run it. Our team was comprised of two artists, one programmer, and me as the sound/music guy. Once we got started, though, the division of labor became extremely murky, with everyone pitching in ideas on the game play, level design, and art. The final game would not have been what it is without the input of every single person on the team. I think that is the most valuable thing I got out of Molyjam. I've been in the game industry for a few years now, but always been on a very large team. It was really refreshing to be able to contribute ideas and make decisions outside of your normal area of expertise, and the fact that the four of us respected each other enough to consider each other's opinions and ideas valid, even if it meant superseding your own idea, made for a great creative environment and ultimately a better game.

We ended up using UDK because we wanted the game to be 3D, and two of the folks on the team had experience using the Unreal engine several years ago. I had minimal experience with UDK, but had wanted to learn it for some time. Just downloading it and poking around in it is the fast track to disappointment. Having such a hard deadline meant I could go in and learn exactly what I needed to to make the game sound the way I wanted without getting lost in the myriad of options the engine presents you. It's a much better way to learn, and it's given me some ideas on how to use it for other projects in the future.

Overall, I had so much fun making our game. I wanted to make a small, independent game for some time. It can be hard to get the right team together, not just in regards to talent but also to motivation. While not sleeping, not leaving the house, and only eating crappy food for 48 hours is not the ideal circumstances in which to make a game, I think there's value in forcing yourself to be creative under extreme limitations. I made some new friends (the out of towners were friends of my room mate), and made something I'm happy with. I hope to do more game jams in the future.

@Maclaine: Why when I downloaded it did it ask me to install a Microsoft.net thing and ask me to check terms and conditions for it before I could install the game? It seems like an odd set-up, surely someone should be able to play it without having to install the .net framework system (although I don't really know how these things work, it is odd)? Because I don't know if I want to have to accept terms and conditions on something I don't really understand.

Nice to know you had fun making it though. :)

@Dixavd That's really odd. I just deleted it and reinstalled it on my machine, and the only thing it installed was the necessary UDK stuff to run it. It has a license agreement, but I didn't see anything for Microsoft.net. I'm stumped.

Haven't followed this until today. Sad that I haven't tho because some of the end products are fantastic! I haven't played any of these since I'm at school but I'm in love with Breaktris and Pause Ahead so far! Can't wait to see more stuff!

I'm totally logging some time tonight with MolyJam games when I get home.  Thanks for the casual reminder!

@Maclaine:

I really liked your game. Even though it was very simple it still worked. Great art too, any chance of sharing some high res renders for wallpapers? The game launches in a pretty small window and there are no options to change the resolution.

@ZagZagovich:

Thanks so much for playing, and for your kind words. We're still actively working on the game, with an emphasis on polishing the gameplay a bit more and possibly fleshing it out. I'll ask one of the artists if he can take some hi-res images that we can share and let you know.

@ZagZagovich:

Hi! Here is a link to a pretty darn hi-res screenshot out of the engine (and some concepts that I threw together quickly in the first few hours). Thanks for playing it!

http://art-envelope.blogspot.com/2012/04/last-friendship-molyjam-2012-screenshot.html

@artenvelope:

Thanks a lot! Good luck in future projects, dudes!

btw. I looked through your blog and I just love it. So much great stuff.