For me, end of January is intrinsically connected with Global Game Jam initiative. First I was organising KrakJam’s (local edition of ggj), but after 2 editions I had enough and Maciek Siwek, friend from Shader (student’s organisation of gamedev) took it over. Because of that I was able to start participating, and this year I also had to take part.
Overall that was my 5th KrakJam, and 3rd in which I jammed. The event took place at Krakowski Park Technologiczny, and broke record of the most participants ever: (around, I don’t have official number) 55.
I was again in two man team with pro graphic artist Mariusz Siergiejew, and as “Pixel Twisters” we did another nice game in flash. You can play it here:
Instruction how to play can be heard in game, but it’s a little unclear so I paste it here as well:
The game is about balancing the amount of news you believe in TV. Too much means you become naive, too little and you become conspiracy theorist.
Let’s move to game – you are the mason’s triangle. You jump from news to news by pointing with the mouse cursor and pressing left mouse key. Your task is to balance the number and size of news on the screen. It can’t be too much or too little.
You can see how well are you doing by the indicators on the right – they should stay near green zone. Click at the news on which your triangle is staying and it will be broken into two, which will start shrinking. Press right mouse key pointing another news – you’ll merge it with the one on which you’re staying, and the newly merged news will start expanding. On the other hand, moving from news to news makes the previous one start shrinking.
The TV news broadcast lasts for 20 minutes – you can see the number on screen. Stay alive that long and you’ll win the game :) By this you’ll also become aware how much time you waste by watching TV.
By pressing button in the top right of TV set, you can look behind the scenes of TV news preparation. There reaction time flows much slower, but the TV time flows much faster. Also, you can use only the one special power (merge or split) which you have used the most in the standard mode. Press F2 or F11 for fullscreen… and good luck!
One last thing: before KrakJam I made a 25 minute lecture with lots of tips about the “jamming process”. You can see the prezi slides here (mixture of polish and english) and the whole presentation (without first 2 minutes, in polish) watch here on YouTube.
It was very nice event, even if a little tiring :) I can’t wait for next jams.
