Weekend 2

We had an Alumni supported Hackathon starting Friday 10:00am and ending Saturday 5:00pm, followed by presentations.

I worked with Dylan (writer), Alex (writer who wants to do game design), Ginger (artist) and Emmy (artist) to make a story based game.  We quickly decided we wanted to do a game, and tossed a number of ideas around.  In the end it is a scrolling game (side-to-side, but we want you to go down) where global warming has caused the oceans to rise and a girl is given a sub and sent to find a new place to live.  She finds her way to Atlantis and dies (or not, as George says the audience owns the story).

I decided to use ImpactJS, a really good (from what I can tell) JavaScript game engine.  I did that because I don't know JavaScript and I've never made a game, so it seemed like a good idea :-)  It took a while to get my head around graphics etc... and some back and forth on file formats, but we had a plan and 8 iterations on the board (like install the software, figure out graphics, get a thing to move, make a maze).

Artists were arting, writers were writing, designers were designing, and programmers were figuring out how the heck to program :-)  By the end of the night, after Dylan's homemade waffles topped with homemade fruit compote from Alex, we had a simple game running.  The alumni were helpful with ideas, focus, and hammering us on scope.

I went home on the train and grabbed some sleep and came back to a bunch of tasks in the morning.  We got fade in/out working, an animated opening, an animated closing, sound, music, moving jellyfish.

We finished with 9 minutes to spare.  The story didn't really get told in the game, sadly, but elements are there.  Another day would have been perfect... but if I had that it would have needed another day... etc.  In the end we had 31 hours to make the game.  Everyone did a great job, some really neat ideas.  Hopefully everyone is comfortable with getting things done under pressure now :-)

Here is a link to the game, Into the Sea.