Six Flavours in One Jam: NSI Game Jam 2013

The 48 hour jam kicked off at 12pm Tues and ended 12pm Thurs.

Game Jams are one of the best meetup competitions a games designer can go to. This one was small, held by the Northern Sydney Institute TAFE in St. Leonards, but it was still worthwhile going just to meet fellow designers and put skills to good use!

Click here for the Facebook event.

On my team was my friend Bob Viet Cuong Le from my church, and two of his uni friends, Mouhamad Abdallah and David Kilford.

The design we concocted together.. was beyond comprehension. To say it fit the theme: That Was Unexpected! ..was quite an understatement.

Firstly, we didn’t just design one game. We designed six games in one. Each of those games then had a twist. We really wanted to screw with the player’s mind. I suggested we could make it non-linear as well, give the player the choice of which game to play, however that wasn’t implemented. Somewhere along the way, we made a joke about having the player see his parents die and then become Batman… and of course, now it had to be in the game.

Ernest

Ding! BATCOIN

So what did I do?

designed cliff and grass textures in Photoshop
helped with modelling and UV mapping
designed all pixel sprites/backgrounds for the first 2D level (the sky was then used as the skybox for every level)
programmed 2D sprite animation for Ernest in the first level
wrote and recorded the script for the narration of the levels. The narration style was a reference to Stanley Parable.
composed an 8-bit piece with a main theme motif for the first 2D level using Famitracker
composed a vinyl-sounding jazz piano version of the theme for the escape level in Ableton
composed an eerie piece for the horror level in Ableton
recorded a door locked sound effect, and mixed sound files in Audacity to create Batman’s jump and land sounds, and when collecting a BATCOIN
The most fun of all however was the voiceacting I did for Batman, my team was cracking up. It was a shame we only had time to put in a handful of them /sadface, however I have included a full compilation in the SoundCloud playlist
Lastly I modelled the bat coin which looked tons better than a plain cube we were using

Have a listen to the music/audio I created via the SoundCloud player!

There were a lot of solid games made by the competing teams, in fact second and third were both solo projects! But they couldn’t beat us hehe. Our game Six Flavours in One Jam came first, and we took home a jar of lollies and $30 to spend on Steam!