Tag: competitions

Entries for tag "competitions", ordered from most recent. Entry count: 40.

Warning! Some information on this page is older than 6 years now. I keep it for reference, but it probably doesn't reflect my current knowledge and beliefs.

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# Global Game Jam 2015 - Our game: ComicsTale

Tue
27
Jan 2015

Last weekend a big event took place - Global Game Jam. As every year, thousands of people around the world had fun while making a game in 48 hours. I was in a jam site 3City Game Jam (link to site at globalgamejam.org) in Gdańsk, Poland, organized in Olivia Business Center by Playsoft Games. With 163 registered jammes, it was one of the biggest in the world (actually 24th out of 518 sites)!

Theme this year was a question: "What do we do now?" so we came up with an idea for a game that looks like a comics, where player has to choose where to click. Our team was:

Developers: Leonardo Kasperavičius, Adam Sawicki
2d artist: Ryszard Niedzielski
Game designer & producing: Frederic Raducki

And here is our game: ComicsTale (source code on GitHub). It is made in Unity (as most of the games), with 2D graphics and with mobile platforms in mind. In the voting on 3City Game Jam, we took 4th place out of around 36.

comicstales_win.zip - Windows Binary
comictales.apk - Android Binary
comictales_mac.zip - Mac Binary

It was fun to make game in a weekend. People were nice, atmosphere was great and there was free pizza! I recommend participating in Global Game Jam to anyone interested in game development. It's much more interesting than coding alone at home and submitting games to some virtual, online competitions.

Comments | #ggj #competitions #productions Share

# Simple 2-digit Method of Task Management

Mon
19
May 2014

Managing some list of tasks to do (or "TODO list") is very important skill that helps in both work and everyday life. I usually use GTD (Getting Things Done) method. But sometimes, like on the recent Hack3city competition, a simpler method is more suitable.

A lot could be said about this subject (maybe some day I write an article or prepare a presentation about it). Generally, tasks to do can be organized based on different criteria, like:

Subject - e.g. which project is this part of.
Order of execution - when some tasks must be done in that particular order.
Context - when and where this task can be done, e.g. only with a computer, at work, at home, in the shopping center etc.
Deadline or particular date and time when this thing must be finished or can be done.
State - e.g. whether it's something you should do or this item is waiting for someone/something to happen first.

Even after "filtering" only tasks that you can do and you should as soon as possible, they can be sorted in three different "dimensions":

Difficulty: how difficult/big/time consuming the task is.
Importance: How important is it to do this or consequences of not doing it.
Urgency: How much this task should be done as soon as possible.

It's obvious that not all the tasks will be done. During a 2-day programmers' competition, just like in everyday life, writing down ideas for doing things is good, but there is never enough time to complete them all. That's why there is a need for some method of deciding what to do next. During Hack3city, I came up with a simple, ad hoc method, which I want to describe here. The goal of developing it was to make the bookkeeping of the list as quick and easy as possible.

During a hackathon like Hack3city, where we created most of our game in just 2 days, the 3rd dimension is not important. Sure sometimes something must be coded quickly because artist or level designer is waiting for it to be able to continue his work. Then I do this first. But otherwise all tasks are equally urgent - they should be done in the short amount of time, during the event. So what I did was I opened the system Notepad and started writing down tasks and all ideas that should be/could be added to our game, one line each. But instead of starting a line with "-" for just a bullet, I started it with two digits, meaning:

First digit: difficulty.
- "1" means easy. Coding and testing it will take only a couple of minutes. If it's a bug, I already know how to fix it and the fix will be simple.
- "2" means moderate. It will take some time to code, but I know how to do it. If it's a bug, I already have some idea about the cause and I assume it's not difficult to fix.
- "3" means difficult. It will take a lot of time and effort to implement. Maybe it needs some learning, reading documentation and experimenting. Maybe I don't even know yet how to do it. If it's a bug, I have no idea what causes it or I know that the fix will be difficult to implement.
Second digit: importance.
- "1" means important. We definitely should have this feature for our game to be playable, complete according to its idea or good looking.
- "2" means moderate. It is important, but if not implemented, it will still be OK.
- "3" means not important. I would be good to have this feature, but it's worth doing only of all more important features are in place.

Normally I just delete lines with tasks I finished, but since some time during the event, I started to move them to "DONE" section instead to show them later in this post. So here is partial task list from our game:

23 smoke effect when player falls onto the ground
22 flashlight rotates when player dies
23 flashlight rotates following player walking animation
31 spear, shooting from a wall when player pushes a button
12 delay appearance of "game over" text
22 push button
12 door that can be opened
13 red eye of zombie should pulse and blink
13 graphics in the menu instead of text
31 sound effects
33 fix ladder climbing animation
31 fix double-jump bug
22 walking sound effects should be played randomly
12 parallax for moving background
21 bug: player death animation doesn't work
11 playsoft logo
12 music
12 zombie: add hysteresis to the decision weather approach the player
21 death from the spikes
12 turning flashlight on and off
22 there are some bugs/spiders walking on the floor
33 a spiked ball on a chain, hanging and swinging from the ceiling

Of course the list of tasks was constantly changing as artist, level designer and me came up with new ideas or decided that something is more or less important, found new bugs during testing etc. But I tried to concentrate on finishing one thing at time. When finished, I picked up next task to do according to following rule: I reviewed whole list to find a task with the smallest sum of its numbers. So the order in which I was doing the tasks was:

11 - First I did the tasks that were both easy to implement and very important.
12 or 21 - If there was no such task, I started doing one that was either of medium difficulty but very important or of moderate importance but very easy.
13 or 31 or 22 - Then I was doing tasks that were not important but very easy, difficult but very important or moderately important and difficult.
23 or 32, and so on...

This way we managed to accomplish most of the tasks we planned so we were quite satisfied with our game as it looked and worked pretty much as we planned. That's why I believe this simple 2-digit method of managing task list is good for hectic, time-constraint and constantly changing work environment.

Comments | #events #competitions #productivity #hack3city Share

# Hack3city 2014 - Review

Wed
14
May 2014

5-11 May 2014 there was first edition of Hack3city - a hackathon in Gdańsk, Poland. It was interesting and unusual in many ways. First of all, there were 4 different tracks, so each developer could choose what is interesting to him.

Sponsored by Intel. Goal was to develop C/C++ application. Theme: personal assistant.
Sponsored by Estimote. Goal was to use iBeacon technology - a bunch of small devices that broadcast their identifier via Bluetooth so a smartphone can detect proximity of particular one.
Sponsored by Microsoft. Goal was to use cloud and Open Data.
Sponsored by Playsoft. Goal was to develop a game. Theme: "Fear of the dark".

Teams could have up to 3 people. Of course I was in the Playsoft track. We made a game together with Arek Duchnowski and Marcin Szymczak, who work in aideMMedia.

On Monday evening there was an official beginning (and free beer :) That's when themes of each track were announced. During the week we could work on our projects from home. On Saturday and Sunday (including the night) we were invited to work all together in an open space in Starter.

Also on Saturday organizers announced additional "diversifiers" (like on Global Game Jam). Fulfilling them was additional plus. For games, they were like "graphics is black and white", "game is controlled with one button" or... "game includes Playsoft logo". You could imagine how such logo might be used in a game themed "fear of the dark" :)

On Saturday and Sunday we have 3 meals - all for free (and free beer at the end :) There were mentors representing the sponsoring companies available in place so we could ask them for help.

There were totally 19 teams participating in all tracks. Most of them were in the gamedev track. Projects were evaluated by a jury based on a 5-minute presentation and there were winners selected in each track. Some teams just presented their applications, while others focused on delivering a PowerPoint presentation. Finally we took 3rd place. See also more about Our game from Hack3city 2014.

Among teams that were creating a game, Unity was the most popular technology. That's also what we have used. But there were different technologies present too, like C++ with Marmalade (which was officially recommended and the prize for 1st place was a license for this library), JavaScript and... Lisp (or Scheme, to be more specific). During work, many interesting stuff could be learn and overheard, like what do artist say when they want to insult programmers: "lerpuj kwaterniona", which means: "go lerp quaternion" :)

But the event was not only about programming. Maybe because it was organized by and in the Starter, it had a "startup feeling". For me it looked like many people, while being programmers, were more focused on money and business than technology. Maybe the culmination of it was presentation of an application that helps with first aid - shows information about how to help injured person, helps measuring rate of artifical respiration etc. Someone from the audience asked a question: "Do you have business model?" Someone else from the audience answered jokingly: "If you want to save someone's life, please first watch this ad".

Overall I think the event was well organized. Rules and general feeling was somehow similar to Global Game Jam, still quite unique and different in many details. I don't know if it's a good idea to announce the theme on Monday and allow working during whole week. Developers with lots of free time have advantage over these who study, have family or a full-time job. I also didn't like the idea of presenting each project 3 times instead of only at the end. It took lots of precious time that we could spend on coding and also made the final presentation less of a suprise. Everything else was great (did I mention free beer?), so I recommend attending this event when it will be organized next time!

Comments | #events #competitions #hack3city Share

# Hack3city 2014 - Our Game

Sun
11
May 2014

I just came back from Hack3city - a programming competition. Participants had to develop their applications over this week - Monday to Friday working from home, while Saturday and Sunday working in Starter, Gdańsk. There were 4 tracks. We participated in track organized by Playsoft, where we had to create a game. The theme of this competition was "fear of the dark". We took 3rd place.

As I promised to some of you, I publish playable version of our game today. The game is created in Unity and can be run in web browser if you have Unity Player installed.

PLAY ONLINE

Controls:

Left, Right - Move
Up - Jump
Down - Crouch
Space - Turn flashlight on/off
Up, Down - Climb ladder (flashlight must be turned off)

Our game is called "Jason McBrady Dark Adventure". It's a 2D platform game. It's about an adventure seeker exploring ancient tombs full of dangers like zombies, who want to kill you, but run away from from the light. It's quite difficult :)

We called our team NOQA. Credits are:

Arek Duchnowski - game design, graphics
Marcin Szymczak - level design, sound
Adam Sawicki - programming

In the next post, I will write more about Hack3city. See: Hack3city 2014 - Review

Comments | #competitions #hack3city #unity #productions Share

# Global Game Jam 2014

Sun
02
Feb 2014

Last time I wrote about our game Ball-B, and today I'd like to say few words about the Global Game Jam in general. For those of you who don't know: It is a worldwide one-weekend event about making games. But it's not just a virtual event where people stay at home and communicate via the Internet. Different organizations around the world share their place so people come to meet and work together as teams. There were 6 sites in Poland. In Warsaw for example, PolyJam 2014 was organized by Poloygon interest group in Warsaw University of Technology. Our site in Gdańsk, called 3city Game Jam (see homepage, entry on globalgamejam.org, Facebook page), was in the office of gamedev studio Playsoft. It was the biggest site in Poland and - according to page Jam Sites by Size - 38th in the world our of 488 with 111 participants. And there was also a waitlist of those who didn't register on time because of limited capacity of the office!

Organizers encouraged us to use Chronolapse to record a time-lapse video from screenshots taken from our desktops in the background. That's an interesting program - I didn't know it before. Unfortunately it didn't work after I connected external monitor to my laptop (despite it claims it supports dual monitor), so finally I didn't use it. They also recorded a time-lapse video from all 48 hours in the office, but I guess it isn't posted on the Internet yet.

The theme this year was a sentence "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." It's so general it could be interpreted quite freely, but many games were about changing a point of view by e.g. switching between different types of characters or some references to psychology. In our site the event had a form of a competition. Voting was using the system just as it's usually done on Warsztat compos and IGK conference - everyone had to choose 3 games (except his own) and give one of them 3 points, one - 2 one - 1. My favourite games were:

Thirst for Freedom. They made 2D game using Unity with isometric view and the map fitting the screen, divided into cells. Player is in a psychiatric hospital. He can change beween two characters - one has schizophrenia and sees the world as colourful, with rainbows and unicorns, while the second one has depression and sees everything as gray and sad. They see the same map differently so they have to collaborate to solve logical puzzles and go out of the map to the next level.
Feel Colored. They also made 2D game in Unity. 3 people playing using 3 pads on same computer shoot each other on a 2D map, fitting the screen, with side view. The screen is divided into 3 colors that are constantly changing, rotating around the center. When player is in the range of his color, he is invincible to the bullets (or something like that). For me that was a very interesting and novel idea.
identikit. They coded in C++ using their custom engine. What's most interesting though is that they used Occulus Rift and the Creative+Intel Color+Depth camera, so it is a virtual reality game. The game is about walking in corridors, waching and choosing paintings on walls. Choices made create psychological portrait of the player according to some psychological theory.

While the winners were:

Get Some Dots. Made in Unity. The game is about shooting in a top-down view. Interesting idea here is that objects (including bullets) move only in the are that the player is facing. Everyting behind him is slowed down. The game is clearly inspired by SuperHot
Thirst for Freedom - mentionel above.
Our game :D

Comments | #competitions #events #ggj Share

# Ball-B - Our Game at Global Game Jam 2014

Thu
30
Jan 2014

Here is the game we made during this year's Global Game Jam. It's called Ball-B. The goal is to defend the base at the center of the arena. You are rolling a physically simulated ball (using arrow keys or WSAD) of one of 5 kinds, each one (except the green one) having a special ability activated with Space. ESC key shows menu.

The game is made in Unity, so it works on the web page (if you have Unity Web Player installed) and can be build for multiple desktop as well as mobile platforms.

Play Online

Windows Binary: Ball_B_Windows.zip (8.78 MB)

Source Code: Ball_B_Source.zip (20.4 MB)