Giant ROM - The Giant Bomb Game Jam

Giant ROM - The Giant Bomb Game Jam

What?

Welcome to the first (I guess?) Giant Bomb themed game jam! Since we're keeping it simple, there are just a few guidelines:

• START: March 28th (don't start working before then)
• END: April 5th (be sure to submit your game before that day ends)
• Any theme goes, so long as it's related to Giant Bomb in some way
• Do what you want, but please try not to be too crude or offensive -
  be a Giant Bomber, not a Giant Bummer!

So that's March 28th to April 5th - 9 days total, which includes two weekends. Hopefully that's enough to let as many people as possible make some really cool, really stupid games!

DUDER, IT'S OVER! THE JAM IS COMPLETE, SO CHECK OUT ALL THESE AWESOME GAMES PEOPLE HAVE MADE!

THERE MAY BE FABULOUS PRIZES MAKING THEIR WAY TO THE WINNERS!

How?

Any means necessary! Zoë Quinn's awesome sortingh.at site points to a ton of useful (and sometimes free!) resources for making games. Anybody can make a game! Heck, even me! :D

PixelProspector's Make Games site is also chock-full of tools and resources!

Handy Tools to Check Out

Anything is fair game! Not sure what to use? Here are some suggestions!

• 2D
  • Construct 2 (free version available, also on Steam!)
  • Game Maker (free version available, also on Steam!)
  • Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion (free version available here: http://www.clickteam.com/clickteam-fusion-2-5-free-edition/)
  • ZX Spectrum game makers, in case you want to bring Jeff's ZX Spectrum game ideas to life [2D Game Maker] [3D Game Maker] (3D just means isometric in this case).
  • Stencyl (free version available)
• 3D
  • Unity
• Text
  • Twine (free version available)
  • inklewriter (free version available)

Tutorials

• Make A Game With No Experience, by Tom Francis (maker of Gunpoint)

Awesome Stuff

Some wonderful users have made content available to help get your silly game started!

• Hamster Alliance music, free of charge (thanks, Hamst3r!)
• SFXR, a nifty tool for making 8-bit sounds! (thanks for the reference, Roger Wilco!)
• Kenney's wonderful asset packs, to give you some graphics! (thanks for the reference, gravytrain!)

• A zip file of awesome Giant ROM logos, to help games get that community feeling! (thanks, Hamst3r!)

Where?

I'll be hosting the jam on itch.io, which has a terrific game jam feature! Everybody will be able to post their creations there, add them to the jam, and enter their team's details at the same time. There's even an integrated ranking system!

Are There Fabulous Prizes?

All participants will be able to rate the submissions using some GB-appropriate parameters, but all in good fun - this isn't meant to be a highly structured thing. There just may be cool things in store for the submissions that stand out in some way, so make that crazy thing you're thinking of!

Wait, What About the Cool Games That People Made Already?

Giant ROM Zero is live! If you've already made a game with a Giant Bomb theme, throw it in! This isn't the actual jam, just a place for games that were made before today!

WHAT NOW?

Organize in the comments and put your team together if you don't have one, so that when the jam begins, you're all set! Keep in mind it's also totally fine to make a game by yourself if you want to, no pressure!

See you when the jam begins! :D

Choo choo!!!

Pretty interested in this... just getting into learning Gamemaker and making a game of my own but it'd be cool to collaborate with some others. The most intimidating part is doing it on your own!

I've been planning on learning Game Maker for a while, but starting from scratch I doubt I could make anything playable in that timeframe. Especially since it's the run-up to Easter and I'll be super busy at work.

I mean, maybe I could put together something super simple and crude. Like Pong but with Jeff's head as the ball (that's a terrible idea, I'm not actually going to do that. It's going to be Vinny's head. Maybe).

Good luck to everyone taking part.

"be a Giant Bomber, not a Giant Bummer!"

I read this in Vinny's voice.

uh oh... i think i really want to do this

If anyone needs some inspiration http://videogamena.me/#_=_ is a good random game name generator.

Sounds interesting, but is there going to be no set theme? I know some people find that limiting but I've always kind of enjoyed working with them myself.

Also would highly suggest OpenFL for anyone making a 2D game that has experience using Flash in the past. It's basically a better version all-around and compiles to a variety of different platforms. http://www.openfl.org/

I'll look into this.

Sidenote: Just played Commander Ryckert. That was AMAZING!

I can program just about anything but art isn't really my strong suit, would anyone be willing to make some 3D models of the gang for use in Unity? I'd be happy to get them autorigged with Mixamo and share those result with the community, that way we should be able to easily attach some animations.

OH man. This is exciting.

Okay, shameless plug time.

Unity Cheshire Component

This is a little tool that I created for the Unity Asset Store. I can't say for certain that it would be useful for a game jam, as it is really more geared toward animating characters, and pre-scripted animated sequences. However, it is free, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. So if any of the Unity users want to take it for a spin in order to get some quick-and-dirty talking characters in their game, feel free.

The component also comes with a 3D model of a head, and an already-set-up sprite for a mouth. Both of these assets are free to use. (otherwise I wouldn't have included them in the tool) I created them myself, so I own the copyright. Anyone can download them from the Unity Asset Store and use them however they please. I can't guarantee that you will want to, neither of them is my best art. But I can guarantee that they both work just fine in the context that I'm using them in. If you have any talent for painting, you can re-paint the 3D model, that would definitely help it to look better.

I can't paint textures to save my life. But when it comes to 3D modeling and sculpting, I'm actually pretty good. I'm not really interested in doing realistic 3D models, but if someone could post some of the "cartoon" interpretations of the giant-bomb gang, I wouldn't mind taking a crack at that. It wouldn't take me all that long to do a basic sculpting pass, retopology, and UV map. Mixamo's a good idea for the rigging, it plays nice with Unity.

Sounds rad. I know literally nothing about making games, but if there is anyone that wants some music written for their game, I would be down to throw something together.

I hope this turns out great and becomes a regular-ish game jam! I'm out of town all next week, but I'd love to take part in another one (or maybe perhaps possibly maybe accept games after the deadline?).

Any artists that want to collabo? It's looking like I'll have to do the art and stuff myself which always takes way too much time and results in such bad quality.

Me and a friend are joining! We're two people both with Unity experience, but we're both busy with university and work so we'll probably only be doing something on the side, but we'll try to do something cool! :D

Thanks for organizing this :)

i'm gonna make a game where jeff has to organize his game collection by recognizing old games/coverart and sending them to the correct box. like tapper. maybe

also, if you need prizes i got some humble bundle codes leftover that i can volunteer

Gonna try to make something for this. I'm a big lover of #onegameamonth so it could be my March game if I finish it in time. Hmmmm.

Hey, so do I! That's a great idea, thank you so much! :D PM me the details, I'll set up a prize pool.

I can give 12 codes away for my Unity AutoBackup plugin. It's not for everyone, but I made it specifically because at game jams I always forget to save regularly for some reason...

@roger_wilco: It might be worth making them and someone may come along and texture them! Worse comes to worst we can texture them FF7 over world style :P

Would people like an FTP dump we can all share audio clips / art / misc stuff that could help?

Also as regards resources, if anyone's been wondering about HTML5 game development I suggest you try out Phaser, a really neat and free library that allows you to do plenty of things easily out of the box. The 'learn' page is here, in-browser editor is here, API is here and the comprehensive examples are here.

If anyone needs a programmer let me know, I want to participate in this but I honestly have no good ideas to use with the theme. Can reach me at forwardbackspace (at) gmail if you're interested. Good to work in 2d or 3d with Unity

Hello,

I'm an experienced programmer willing to help out people making projects in Unity 5, so if any team needs a little help drop me a PM and I'd be glad to lend a hand.

Also, if there are any art contributes out their looking to join a project, I'm planning on making a mock game combine Gods Will Be Watching and Mario Party where you manage the GB staff on the couch playing a mario party game.

Cheers

This is a GREAT idea, I hope you make it as I really want to play that now.

Does itch.io have a method of loading up a Print-and-Play tabletop game?

I'd like to get in on this. Am I to understand there is not an overall theme to be announced? That's one of my favorite parts of LD Jam. It forces you to come up with a design idea on the spot when it starts. With out it, I have a hard time filtering ideas...

I think you can set it up as a downloadable! It will pretty much accept any sort of zip file, so maybe that would work?

I think 'Giant Bomb' is a more explicit theme than most Ludum Dare themes are already. Getting more specific than that might risk being too restrictive.

@havochq: That would be fine. PDFs in a zip file is my goal then.

Hey!

If anyone needs any 8-bit music/sounds for a game let me know! I've got a few tracks on Soundcloud at the moment if you want to hear some

www.soundcloud.com/matthewsquibb

Dammit, my MGS4 play through is just going to have to wait.

It's the 28th in an hour and 15 minutes here.

I'll probably be cobbling something together in Twine.

That sounds very interesting. I'm looking forward to it.

Have you ever looked into inkle? Seems like an even simpler platform for choose your own adventure type things. It's the storytelling backend to some good iphone games like 80 Days and the Sorcery series. I haven't ever actually written a full story, but went through the tutorial. You can pretty easily create branching path stories with simple variables to store player choices. And it's free!

@havochq It might be worth adding inkelwriter to the list of game tools as well as Twine.

Maybe I can use this as an excuse to learn the basics of Ren'Py. Problem is I'd need help with the art side of things or just slap up a public domain background and ride it out that way.

A fine idea. There's always some debate over how much of a game interactive fiction really is. But I always loved choose-your-own-adventures. I actually tried Twine out the other week for the first time, and found it marvelously easy to get into. The advantage of a tool like Twine for a game jam is that it lets you skip directly to content creation.

@havochq: You should add http://kenney.nl/ for resources. The guy has a ton of CC licensed graphics that can be used!

Gonna be participating in this along with the very talented @aurahack and Nat Lee! Looking forward to it.

(P.S. If you're an experienced composer or SFX artist and you're interested in helping out, drop me a line on Twitter: @CrispyLovesYou)

Good luck to all participants!

Non-programming types might want to try Stencyl, which is a free & easy way to make Flash games.

Think I might make something with Dr. Tracksuit since I already have the art from putting him in another game of mine.

Here are the games I threw together in the past.

BomberDuder

Megaman X Giant Bomb

Picross

I won't be in for this one, but hopefully it will turn out well and another one will happen, can't wait to check out what everyone makes either way! :)

@fobwashed: Oh cool! :D Would it be possible for you to put them up on itch.io so they can be added to the Giant ROM Zero anthology?

I think I'm in.

I'm in, but I am probably going to need some help with imagery. Otherwise the puppy petting simulator is going to have a Thomas Was Alone vibe.

Not that there is anything wrong with Thomas Was Alone, it is an awesome game, but those blocky edges would be a bit too sharp to pet.

So I have zero inspiration for this. I've spent time thinking about a game to make but I'm coming up blank :( so here's what I'm gonna do:

if anyone needs a Unity C# programmer I'm available and I have a lot of free time to work on a game this coming week. If you're an artist or designer who doesn't know how to code or just a programmer who needs an extra pair of hands I'm up for any idea you might have!

I got some good work done today on my game. Unfortunately not a whole lot because I had previous engagements that took up most of the day, but things are looking good so far. At least story, animation and some asset creation stuff. Hopefully I'll get around to actual game play tomorrow. Whatever that's going to be...

Anyone able to provide me with a side on Matt Rorie drawing?

Also, does anyone have any ideas on where I can get drawings of doggies from the side view?

Starting on my game tomorrow as I'm pretty busy today. Will post some initial screenshots once I'm up and running. Not quite ready to say what it is yet as I wanna get the initial setup done to check it's all gonna work.