Last weekend I built a game in 48 hours. It was an incredible experience, and I got to collaborate with people in the game industry to put together a complete five minute experience in two days.

This year’s Global Game Jam has been the biggest to date, with over 50 locations in 23 countries participating. In a weekend over 300 games were created, and you can play them all in the Game Browser on the site.

The game that our team made is a simple puzzle game where you must move blocks around and escape a maze. We came up with the concept early on, but it was only with the story and visuals and audio that it really came together. As it stands now it is a short complete experience where you must make strategic moves and tough decisions. Use the arrow keys to escape the camp without getting caught in the light. Push crates and other people around to open up pathways and block the light. Can you do it without sacrificing a prisoner?

Play For Shame.

Note: Give it a little time to load (the file is about 5 megabytes).

Our second experimental game is a tile-laying board game where players must build up terraces like in Machu Picchu — the winner is the person who has built the highest and most with their tiles. Stay tuned for updates through the week — we hope to have a working game before GameJam starts this weekend, in which we will be participating with teams around the world to build a game in 48 hours.

Click on the image to play our first game of the semester. Making this game was a great chance to unearth some old coding skills and discover some new ones. I still have a lot to learn, though, and Sally Mo (the main character in Dewberry Farms) sometimes has problems. If she disappears during gameplay, simply hit the try again button in the bottom right corner to restart the level.

We are really interested to hear what you think of the game, what was fun and what could be done better. Please leave any comments or critiques here or at bighadrongames.com.

BHg just got its own website, bighadrongames.com. We are currently developing 12 experimental games in 4 months.

The first game that a colleague and I are working on has been in production for 10 days and has now entered beta. We are interested in feedback even after the development cycle is over so that we can hone our rapid prototyping and renaissance developing skills.

The beta can be found locally at flash/WeatherGame-beta.swf.

UPDATE: the final version of this first game can be found here (local).

Any feedback, bug reports, design critiques or coding tips are welcome!

More design docs being written on our shared desktop over at Vyew.com.

Pic is from page 6 on game flow:

The simple flow of our game and all the work that needs to be done to get it playable.

For our first game we decided to use Flash. After two days of design, we have come up with a fairly simple concept: the player is a weather god who can only affect the environment. Peons (little farmer AI) move around the screen looking for places to build farms and generate more peons. The player must wield their weather abilities to create the right conditions for growth.

Check out a live version of our design docs. Here are a few snapshots:

Weather available to player — Rain, Sun, Lightning

Actions of peons (AI) — Move, Fight, Build

Terrain — Desert, Barren, Grassy, Fertile, Flooded, Mountain

We collaborated on these designs using Vyew.com, a free online webconferencing app that allows you to draw objects and use text and voice.

Welcome to my new blog. You can find the old one here. I decided to make a clean break for a number of reasons, among them the fact that I haven’t updated the last one for months and the design sorely needed a makeover.

However, a chief motivation for beginning again is to turn the focus of my blog to my chosen field, the game industry.

I have just begun my final semester at the Masters of Digital Media, and in April will be graduating from (get this) UBC, SFU, BCIT and Emily Carr, all at the same time. While I have no idea how the logistics of that work, I do know that we are the inaugural class of this very unique partnership, which means that we are guinea pigs. Guinea pigs that will be watched intently when we exit, scrutinized see if the experiment was successful and we actually have developed “the professional skills required to be effective creators, practitioners, and senior managers in this rapidly growing industry.”

In order to give the scrutinizers something to talk about, six of us students have banded together in this last semester to do something wild and crazy. Between us we will be developing 12 experimental games in 4  months. The pace will be roughly a game every two weeks, and our mantra is simple: everybody makes games.

That’s right. One assumption made by many studios today is the notion that specialization leads to better games. We are aspiring to be a team of generalists that span the entire gamut of game development: ART, CODE and DESIGN. In short, we wish to be renaissance developers.

I will be using this blog to document my forays into each of these three areas in the coming months. I will also be focusing on the two supplementary areas that are important to any renaissance man or woman, their own personal WELLBEING and an understanding of how to bring whatever it is they are renaissancing to PUBLICATION.

If you are interested in tracking my progress, you may also find the links to the left sidebar helpful to see where I am drawing my inspiration from. These are taken from my delicious account.

Happy 2009, and welcome to the new extension.mwj