June had come and gone without having produced my One Game A Month, and I was into the last week of July.. I needed to do something drastic. So I decided to have an impromptu one day gamejam a couple of days before the deadline. Work feverishly all day long and see what pops out the other end!
Make games. Not 1GAM logos.
A couple others from the 1GAM-Dublin google group joined in on the day and we got to work. Our theme for the month by the way was 'KAWAII!!!!'.
Since gamejams work so well for my gamedev productivity I've decided to take part in a similar monthly challenge: One Game A Month. The basic idea is to try and finish one game every single month – it can be something simple or complex as long as you complete something every month. There is loads more information at onegameamonth.com – I highly recommend taking part!
Make Gamedev Challenges. Not Excuses.
Not only that – but I've helped set up a meetup group for fellow 1GAM enthusiasts in Dublin, Ireland. We are going to meet at the end of every month to playtest each others creations and generally swap war stories. Our very first meetup was last night and was a great success! If you want to join us sign up to the 1GAM-Dublin google group. But what about my game for April? Read on!
I love gamejams. You and your fellow participants all crowd into a room and build a whole load of games in a day or a weekend, all with a common theme. It's a lovely combination of community creativity and enforced delivery. Not only must you all come up with cool on-theme ideas for games… but you've got to get something finished before the time is up! It's a great way to flex your game-makin' muscles, and it consistently surprises me how much you can get done with a bit of focus. In short it is an inspiring experience. Make sure you try one!
Sweet logo guys!
I recently attended Gamecraft, an excellent 12 hour gamejam held in Dublin. About 80 people turned up on the day, with the theme announced at 9am leading to 12 hours of frenetic game-making by all involved, followed by 2 hours of judging & trying out other people's games. Yum!
Flex is a free development framework from Adobe that can compile your work into both Flash movies (which run on any browser), or into AIR desktop applications that can run on any operating system. With Flash being almost universal on browsers it has always been a great way to deploy interactive or rich media applications online; Flex makes it much easier to do this, especially if – like us – you are from a programming rather than a design background (the traditional creators of Flash content). Flex has a lot of built-in components to help make what they call RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), which are basically spruced up web applications delivered via Flash. Here's a great example of a sweet-looking app built with Flex, twittervision 3D which shows live Twitter tweets on a 3D globe. Very nicey.
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