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Boston Game Devs Make 8 Games in 36 Hours

Posted by Zonk on Fri Jan 26, 2007 02:08 PM
from the much-better-than-american-idol dept.
Programming Games
Darius Kazemi writes "This past weekend, a bunch of Boston-area game developers got together and did a 36-hour Boston Game Jam, inspired by the Indie Game Jam. We made eight games in 36 hours based on the theme of 'shift' for platforms as diverse as PC, GBA, and cell phones. The games range from a surprisingly complex behavioral sim to a game where you have to squish your opponent in a 2D physics deathmatch. Most of the games are available for download right now, and some of them even include the source code. In days to come, we'll be adding developer diaries and other goodies."
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  • flash (Score:2)

    by gambit3 (463693) on Friday January 26 2007, @02:26PM (#17773528)
    (http://www.neolibrarium.com/ | Last Journal: Friday January 10 2003, @11:19AM)
    flocking Flash.

    I hate it when sites make it impossible to navigate unless you have flash installed. Anyone have a direct link to bypass the flash?

  • Innovation in Gaming? (Score:1)

    by c0d3r (156687) on Friday January 26 2007, @02:31PM (#17773648)
    (http://www.wanfear.com/~mbrito)
    What would be a new "Innovation" in game development? With all of the functionality now pushed to chips, is it now in the harware engineer's realm? Perhaps more creative artists and plots. I'd be curious to know just how much other mainline medias such as video and audio communication/content is integrated with games.

    • Re:Innovation in Gaming? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Altus (1034) on Friday January 26 2007, @05:58PM (#17777516)
      (http://slashdot.org/)

      you have fallen into a trap. You believe that an innovative game means finding a new way to push bits around faster or better than before. It does not. A better game is created by designing something that is fun to play. Innovation comes in the form of new game play mechanics, new input styles, new types of stories.

      Making a game with 10 times the polygons of the closest competitor is not really game innovation. Graphics innovation sure, but you could make pacman with everything bump mapped and shaded and such but it would still play like pacman.
      [ Parent ]
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  • 8 games by 8 teams... (Score:2)

    by jbreckman (917963) on Friday January 26 2007, @02:46PM (#17773950)

    They had 8 groups of people all make a game each in 36 hours.

    Impressive still, but not really news.

  • One artist? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SpaceToast (974230) on Friday January 26 2007, @02:55PM (#17774150)
    (http://www.spacetoast.net/STP | Last Journal: Thursday May 11 2006, @10:08PM)

    Very cool, but why one artist and one sound designer, floating between fifteen developers? Every team should have at least its own artist -- and don't think [wikipedia.org] we aren't [wikipedia.org] into this sort [wikipedia.org] of thing [wikipedia.org].

    You've got the Massachusetts College of Art, one of the best and one of the scrappiest art schools in the country, right across the river. Next year, think about reaching out. You'll be amazed at the response, and the amount of polish these kids can do on deadline.

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  • Their website is useless (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2007, @03:03PM (#17774304)
    That's neat, I guess. Too bad they don't explain:

    Who?

    According to the home page they're "a bunch of professional game developers from around the Boston area". I know of no game development companies from Boston (and I live next to it!) so some idea of WHAT kind of games these developers have worked on would be helpful.

    What platform?

    What platform is required to play the games? Not even the game download page really explains how to play the games. Apparently some are cell phone and GBA games, with no indications on how you'd play them.

    License?

    What license are these licensed under? Presumably some proprietary license as there's no indication of source code being available.

    All in all, the webpage is basically worthless, giving no useful information about who these developers are, what the games are for, why they were created, how they're intended to be played - anything.

    Overall - useless.

  • 24 hour comics (Score:1)

    by Nananine (967931) on Friday January 26 2007, @03:47PM (#17775188)
    This reminds me of 24 hour comics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_hour_comic) which are 24-page comics drawn and inked in--you guessed it--24 hours. There's an annual 24 Hour Comics Day event that usually compiles a number of hand-picked comics made by artists and writers across the country. Italy's started their own version of it. It'd be cool if this was made into a annual challenge for dev's around the globe.
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  • But where... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cervantes (612861) on Friday January 26 2007, @03:54PM (#17775354)
    (Last Journal: Wednesday November 06 2002, @05:15PM)
    But, where's my Duke Nukem Forever? I'm pretty sure that a hardcore 2 day coding crunch would end up with a better game than what they have so far...

  • What languages were used? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by damg (906401) on Friday January 26 2007, @04:29PM (#17776012)
    What languages were used? I would think that, given the time limit, something like Python (with PyGame or PyOgre) would be preferred over the more traditional C++?

  • I like the way this is going (Score:1)

    by Colourspace (563895) on Friday January 26 2007, @04:58PM (#17776514)
    I'm a 'musician' (clue : it's not what I get paid for). This is the second story I have seen recently where creative fields are given a limited time to come up with 'product' as part of a community project. As a lone musician I spend too much time in a bubble re - recording things time and time again even though the first take was probably good enough (which ultimately has the potential to stifle further creativity) - I can imagine the same happens to writers/artists/musicians or any people from any creative industry. I applaud this sort of collaboration it can only lead to more quality out there, and quality that's free for all, not quality controlled by publishers.
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  • Squish (Score:2)

    by radarsat1 (786772) on Friday January 26 2007, @05:32PM (#17777070)
    (http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair)
    Well, all I can tell so far is that Squish seems to work very strangely under Ubuntu/Wine.

  • Alternative title (Score:1)

    by ecuador_gr (944749) on Friday January 26 2007, @06:01PM (#17777578)
    (http://www.ecuadors.net/)
    alt_title = 1 / Duke Nuken Forever

  • Re:Fast track development... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Odin_Tiger (585113) on Friday January 26 2007, @02:50PM (#17774032)
    (Last Journal: Friday January 20 2006, @11:57AM)
    You know it's a dead horse of a joke when FP gets modded Redundant.
    [ Parent ]

  • Re:Is this a joke (Score:2)

    by Fnkmaster (89084) on Saturday January 27 2007, @03:25PM (#17785102)
    Yeah, I mean Harvard [harvard.edu] and MIT [mit.edu] have never contributed anything to phys... oh, never mind.
    [ Parent ]
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