NYC Molyjam: The Journey and the Aftermath.
By D_W 1 Comments
I had never attended a game jam before. I never really thought I was in a position or skilled enough to complete something in such little time. But I love ridiculous ideas and the mock twitter account, PeterMolydeux, was one of the reasons why I signed for twitter so I could not have not gone to Molyjam. (Now there's an awkwardly worded sentence!)
For those that don't know. Molyjam was (is?) a game jam based around ideas from tweets made to satire things the real Peter Molyneux might have said. The one rule of the game jam was any game made had to use at least one of the tweets posted by the mock account.
NYC Molyjam was at one of the New School's buildings and was free to attend. After some introductions to the jam and rooms everyone there mingled and eventually over the course of Friday night about 4 or 5 teams were formed and ideas were discussed. The team was able to get into consisted of the organizer for the NYC jam, the UI designer from Doublefine, and various members from the New School's Game Club. We ended up having 4 programers, 3 graphic artists, a writer, and a composer/sound engineer which was me. The whole process of what idea we choose base our game off of was pretty organic. We had a few. One of them being an idea for a roguelike that generates it's game map by a string a text from any of the tweets that Molydeux has made. Which is awesome, but a bit to ambitious for the 48 hour limit. Eventually we settled on the idea from this tweet: "What if your son was the sun? If he sleeps, the sun vanishes. If he cries then woodlands set on fire etc."
And thus Prodigal Sun was born.
I had made a good chunk of sound effects and music for the game that did not get used, but like the saying goes "it's better to make more than you need and not use it then need something and not have it." The goal I had with the music was to set mood. There was some discussion that maybe it's the Sun's birthday, so I tried to make it festive. The village was sort of medieval but they have rocketry, so I used medieval-esque instruments made then out-of-tune to be more realistic (...yes yes I know) and combined them with some synthesizers.
When it came to the sounds, I used mostly stuff from a sound effect library I own as well as original work I have recorded. So of the sounds, like the scream for example, I had to record myself doing. Additional sounds came from the public domain and I don't think they ended up in the final version of the game.
Working with everyone on the team was refreshing and fun. Everyone did their part and their best to get the game done on time without any BS that I've encountered with other teams. Maybe it was because the short deadline or because they all wanted to create something absurd and awesome. Regardless, it was probably the best experience I had working with a group of strangers.
But enough about the game I worked on. What about the other games at the NYC jam? Well.....
Betraille:Part Deuxwas an interesting multiplayer game similar to Assassin's Creed's multiplayer. Basically there are a whole bunch of variously color cubes moving around the game map. You're controlling one of them. You have to figure out which one, then figure out which ones are being controlled by the other players and get near them to take them out. However if it's an non-player character then you are removed. Whichever player is left at the end of the game wins. It was pretty fun and there was certainly some interesting strategies to employ.
These Automatic Arms was a quite fun and bizarre top down shooter where you couldn't control your shooting and would constantly being turning left. The object was to avoid shooting innocent people (which were of course represented by green squares). It was really cleverly designed and worth checking out.
Finally, the game that I was most impressed by was What Would Molydeux? which was, as one of the designers put it, so innovating to video games that they removed the video part. It's a card game. The object of the game is to create sentences that sound like something Molydeux would tweet. The first person to put down a period (full stop) wins the round so the object is to keep the sentence going as long as possible and make it difficult for other players to finish the sentence. Not only was this fun and ridiculous, but it showed a certain cleverness that one must appreciate. I hope the guys who made it work on a free digital version similar to siteslike duelingnetwork (yugioh) and Fantasy Strike (Yomi) have done for other card games.
All and all my first game jam was an amazing experience that I am glad I had. I hope to someone work again with the people that were on my team someday in a professional capacity, and wish them and everyone who participated a luck with what ever they go on to after this! Can wait til the next one!