When Untold Entertainment Inc. turned three last year, we were reeling from the fallout of the global economic collapse. It’s been a slow, difficult recovery, and we still have a lot of work left to do, but i’m happy to say we’ve nosed out of the tailspin. This was a landmark year for Untold; we are poised to have an absolutely incredible fifth year going forward. If last year was our Empire, this year is our Jedi. Bring on the Ewoks, baby.

Here’s a look at the Year That Was.

2010

August

Last fiscal ended on a dark note. We were struggling through Spellirium, our post-apocalyptic puzzle adventure game, as various production problems saw the budget sapped with very little to show for our efforts. The year ahead had us planning to complete service projects in the hope that we’d bank enough margin to continue working on the game.

September

My book was published! Unity 3D Game Development by Example: A Beginner’s Guide is a great introduction to game development, computer programming, and Unity 3D itself, which is a super-powerful game engine for creating on a wide variety of platforms. Thanks to you all for buying a copy, or for recommending the book to your friends.

Fall

We launched Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two on YTV.com. Jinx 3 was the first game to use UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System. It supported multiple playable characters, an inventory system, a subtitle system, game variable control, and a “puppet” guidance system, which enables the developer to write commands to build in-game cutscenes. Jinx 3 was the first UGAGS game we developed, but the second one to launch, after Heads.

i spoke about UGAGS at Gamercamp Level 2.0, a Toronto convention celebrating the joy of video games.

October saw the publication of a now-infamous article about the Vortex Game Development Competition, where the previous year’s winners were revealed to have never worked on the winning game.

i experimented with a feature called Linkbait Tuesdays, where i used the Linkbait Generator to spit out randomized titles for blog posts. It wasn’t much appreciated by my readership, and didn’t appreciably increase blog traffic, so i killed the feature.

On Hallowe’en, we launched our second free games portal called ZombieGameWorld.com. If you know the song about the old woman who swallowed the fly, you’ll understand our challenge with these portals. We built WordGameWorld.com in order to attract a word game-playing audience, so that we could control the site’s ad inventory and find an audience for Spellirium. When the site suffered from flagging traffic, i decided to build a network of game portals; ZombieGameWorld.com was ostensibly created to help drive traffic to WordGameWorld.com, which should drive traffic to Spellirium.

To round out the fall, i grew a beard to win hockey tickets, despite not enjoying hockey. i spoke at an interactiveontario luncheon. And i wrote an article for Mochiland.com on the disgraceful refusal by contracting companies to credit their Flash game developers.

Winter

As the cold weather set in, i took a position at a private college teaching Unity 3D game development. i had hoped for a better experience than i had at Hervé Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined, but no such luck: halfway through the course, which was dubbed Programming II (the students had supposedly been taught Flash/Actionscript for four months prior to my arrival), i had to dial everything back and re-teach programming basics to them. And by basics, i mean stuff like “What does the ‘=’ symbol do?” and “What is a variable?”

The class was only eight students, but i had no fewer than two of those students’ parents call or email me to ask why little Billy was getting low grades on tests. YaRly.

In this, i further proved the thesis in my contentious What’s Wrong with Ontario Colleges articles (Part 1 and Part 2). Helicopter parenting and failure aversion have created a generation of non-functional kids, which i later dubbed The Most Useless Generation. My diagnosis is that many college undergrads have escaped high school without ever understanding How to Be a Student (an article i wrote while teaching last winter, which i’ve only just posted now that i’ve put some distance between myself and the situation).

In the interest of helping young people be more successful, i offered My Prescription for (More) Successful Students, which my students all ignored, and i wrote a serious of articles called Understanding Programming to explain programming basics, which my students also ignored. Oh well. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but sometimes you just have a retarded horse.

2011

Spring

In 2011, we launched an exciting blog series called Pimp My Portal, detailing our struggles to drive traffic to ZombieGameWorld.com and WordGameWorld.com. The hook here was The World’s Most Meager Marketing Budget, a pot of just $100 that i spent on Fiverr.com to buy testimonial videos to promote the site, the rationale being that search loves video. The Old Lady who Swallowed the Fly reared her ugly head again, as i found that i had no audience to watch the videos to go to the portal to go to the OTHER portal to find out about Spellirium. The Pimp My Portal series is ongoing.

Around this time, we were commissioned by The Centre for Skills Development and Training to produce a series of games to help teach workplace skills to 15-30-year-olds. The resulting game, Summer in Smallywood, enabled us to make a number of improvements to UGAGS, including auto-save, debug tools, navigation meshes, saved game profiles, and threaded conversations. We’re looking forward to working further with The Centre in the coming year to expand our educational gaming experience.

In March, i admit i was feeling a little bit desperate and squirrely. Work was trickling into the shop in fits and starts, and i was really wondering whether renewing our lease would be wise. Wild-eyed and hungry at GDC, i was overcome with the need to let the world know i am here, like the tiny Whos living on a speck on a clover stalk, who ultimately issue a resounding YOPP! to show the jungle animals that they exist (and to keep from getting boiled in beezlenut oil).

To that end, i pulled some shenanigans at the conference, which came to be known as the famous GDC Coin Stunt. The resulting press on most major online games sites greased the wheels for what was to be our greatest victory yet.

Over the years, we’ve found it so difficult to drive enough steady Flash game development work that we haven’t been able to bank enough time or enough money to do our own thing. To date, the only chance we seem to get is TOJam, an annual weekend-long Toronto game jam, during which we always produce a complete and original game. Indeed, nearly every title in the Original Games section of our portfolio is a TOJam game, completed in one weekend by me alone.

This year, we used UGAGS to create Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. i worked on the game with my 5-year-old daughter Cassandra. It was no accident that i was wearing my “I have all the coins” T-Shirt in the TOJam group photo this year. After the game went live, it went viral, initially being featured on many of the same sites that covered the coin stunt. In the few months since its launch, the ponycorns game has gone on to become an international sensation (i just granted an interview to a Japanese newspaper this week!).

With the ponycorns game, we took a very important step to improving our viability as a dev studio by launching the game on the Apple iPad and the BlackBerry Playbook. On the third day of its launch week, Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure was featured by Apple in its New & Noteworthy section.

Ponycorns also drove us to develop our first alternate revenue stream based on our original IP. We launched the Untold Booty merchandise store with a number of different ponycorns-based SKUs, and have been very happy with the results.

Throughout the year, i remained active with the IGDA Toronto Chapter, organizing some well-received events including the speed dating-style Game.Set.Match, the Open Mic Night rant session, Straight Outta TOJam: Pint-sized Postmortems, and the Fund in the Sun workshop.

Through the spring, we developed a great puzzle/platformer game called Spladder, which currently runs on a number of kids’ broadcaster sites – YTV.com. TVO.org and CBBC.co.uk among them.

We launched a new games portal called TowerDefenseGameWorld.com and filled it with free tower defense games, because it’s difficult to prove a theory about a network of games portals lending each other traffic if you only have two portals. We also gave a major upgrade to ZombieGameWorld.com by expanding it to feature zombie games and goodies on other platforms.

i know an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead, of course.

Summer. Future.

We’ve come full circle. Spellirium remains unfinished, but we’re finally spending time on it again. We poked Kahoots with a stick to see if it was still twitching. Thankfully, it is! We’ve made some creative changes to it to spare a fellow indie game dev company some unpleasant legal strife; look forward to a Kahoots-related announcement in the coming months.

i’m writing the 3.x update to my Unity 3D book, which will be ready shortly (send me an email and i’ll add you to our notification list when the update is released).

Going forward, our plan is to leverage the success of the ponycorns game to make major in-roads into game development and education for kids (see our article on CBC.ca). i’m preparing a pilot project with Cassie’s elementary school this fall. We’re preparing the unstoppable UGAGS engine for a business-to-business, and then consumer, release – expect it to have a kid-friendly interface. We’re polling people for their interest in an iPhone/iPod version of the game (send us an email!). i’ll be delivering my conference session Ponycorns: Lightning in a Jar at the Screens festival this fall, and at other conventions throughout the year. Ponycorns is being translated into Japanese in anticipation of the Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Games Show.

Untold Entertainment’s fifth year will be filled with low-life panda bears, daily word puzzles, gamesByKids, and more great articles about game development and education, peppered with rude jokes and stolen LOLcat pictures. Thanks so much for your support, everyone! i’m really looking forward to writing an amazing recap next year.

Cassie drew all the pictures, wrote all the titles, and recorded the voice of the main character. She also came up with the NPCs (including Mr. Turtle, the Mean Tiger, and the villainous Lemon), and designed some of the puzzles (including the one where you [SPOILER ALERT] have to read a sign to justify your need for a coconut to throw at the Lemon).

Send Cassie to College?

i used Mochimedia’s ad service to inject ads into the game, which is fitting, because Mochi was a TOJam sponsor this year. i threw ads in there with the hope that the game might drum up a little bit of cash, which i will put toward the education fund that Cassie’s grandma started for her. Wouldn’t it be cool if Cassie’s game paid for college? (Sadly, it won’t happen. See the Pimp My Game series for more reasons why.) For kicks, i added a PayPal Donate button beneath the game.

Alert Child Services

Dragging your kid to a weekend-long game jam, eh? Before you call Children’s Aid on me, please understand that i didn’t actually keep Cassie captive at TOJam all weekend long. She came in with me at 9:30 Saturday morning, and was the most excited i’ve ever seen her. We’d been preparing her for MONTHS so that she’d be emotionally ready for TOJam. After the organizers expressed concern that my rotten kid would be running around the place pestering people and making noise (an entirely likely scenario, if you’re familiar with my insane children and my lousy parenting style), i spent every evening coaching Cassie.

Me: Remember, you’re the first little girl who’s ever made a game at TOJam. And everyone’s worried you’re going to run around screaming and making noise and wrecking things.

Cassie: (shocked face) No i won’t!

Me: *i* know you won’t. (totally lying here – i was as nervous about it as anyone) But you have to prove to everyone that little girls can make video games too. If you’re very well behaved, then next year if another little girl wants to come and make a game, the TOJam people will say “the little girl who made a game last year was SO wonderful, we’d LOVE to see more little girls making games.”

Cassie: i’ll be have. i will!

Yes, Cassandra, There Is a Game Jam

The morning of TOJam was like Christmas for her. i’m not kidding. In the days leading up to the event, she told everyone she knew that she was going to TOJam. Naturally, they had no idea what she was talking about, but the strangers in the elevator and in the grocery store smiled and nodded politely all the same.

By the end of the day on Saturday, Cassie had spent 10 hours at TOJam, and was begging me to let her stay overnight. She had put in about 6 hours of actual colouring work, and sunk at least another hour into voice acting later that evening at home, where it was quieter. i tucked her into bed and returned to TOJam late Saturday evening, and then pulled an all-nighter scanning her crayon drawings and integrating them with the game logic using UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System).

Family Jam

Sunday morning after church, the whole family joined me at TOJam with a bunch of instruments in tow. My wife Cheryl and the two little girls sat together on the carpet down a quiet hallway. Cassie grabbed the harmonica, i took the drum, Cheryl took the ukulele, and little Isabel used the thumb harp and the Happy Apple. We recorded some music tracks together. The one that made it into the game intro is just Cassie and Izzy playing together. It was really nice to have everyone involved like that. Here’s the family track that didn’t quite make the cut:

Sunday evening, the family regrouped at TOJam. The game, while still unfinished, was set up in a hallway where Cassie excitedly ran up to any interested passers-by, snatched the mouse out of their hands, and said “I MADE THIS! LEMMIE SHOW YOU HOW TO PLAY!”

i think it was a really valuable life lesson for Cassie to see that all her hard work and effort went into making a product that brought smiles to the faces of her players. The next step is to brave the hairy Playbook process to get it on the device so that Cassie can bring it to school for Show & Tell.

Correcting History

i really hope you enjoy Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. In all of this, our goal as parents is to give our kids the kind of childhood we would KILL to have had. i can’t imagine how different my life would have been if i had made a real working video game with my father at age 5. In fact, i can’t imagine how different my life would have been if he hadn’t left when i was eight months old.

But no matter. Some day, the ponycorns will get him.

Seriously, if you want to attend TOJam and you haven’t signed up yet, i don’t know why you’re over here reading this crummy blog. Space is limited. Go sign up now. Like, right now. i’ll wait.

Party of One

This’ll be the first TOJam that i haven’t done all by my lonesome. After creating Two By Two, Here Be Dragons, Bloat., and Heads single-handedly, i’ve finally roped someone into spending an entire weekend with me in a room full of sweaty nerds building video games. And better than that, she’s a girl. How did i do it?

i’m her legal guardian.

This year, i’m teaming up with my five-year-old daughter Cassandra to create a game called Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, which is a magical adventure game featuring ponycorns. (At this point, i usually have to stop and explain to people what a “ponycorn” is, which dismays me … a ponycorn, clearly, is a single-horned pony – a pony/unicorn. A ponycorn. You see? Was that so difficult?)

Cassie, who is a great little artist, will be drawing the game’s pictures in crayon, and i’ll be scanning them in and trying to shoehorn them into a sensible game experience. Because the handicap is so high on this one, i won’t be building the whole thing from scratch. i didn’t approach my first TOJam this way … i was determined to build Two By Two from “scratch”, starting with nothing and using Flash to build the game from the ground up.

Having proven that i can do it, over the years i’ve grown less and less dogmatic about TOJam. For last year’s game, Heads, i used UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System), as a sort of proof that the time and money we spent building the engine wasn’t a total waste. (It wasn’t! Heads was our very first release on the Blackberry Playbook, and we’ve gone on to use UGAGS in other projects). When i got thinking about it, even using Flash is a bit of a cheat. i didn’t write that software, and it does a lot of heavy graphics lifting for me. i also didn’t build the computer, or smelt the metals used in its creation. There’s only so much “scratch” that you can start from.

So this year, Cassie and i will be using the Citrus Engine to make our ponycorn-themed puzzle platformer game. i’m not even starting from scratch with the Citrus Engine – i’ll be re-skinning an existing game that i completed for a client. i’ll even be using some artwork that Cassie already drew months ago, because it’s adorable. (“What’s that, honey? An alien? A slug? A jelly bean?” “No – it’s you and me and Mommy.”) As is required for any weekend game jam, we’re keeping our ambitions reined way in; if we come out the other side of this thing with a title screen and one functional level, i’ll be happy.

i’ve also got Cassie slated to do some voice acting for the game, which will toally rock. Unless someone’s planning to one-up her, Cass will be the youngest developer ever to attend and work on a game at TOJam.

And i’ll be the sexiest elf in the room.

TOJam is not a competition. It’s rather more like camp … hot, sweaty nerd camp fueled by energy drinks and candy bars. Every year, the organizers suggest that each game feature a Toronto-specific sound effect, and a picture of a goat on a pole (rendered any way the game’s artist chooses). Here’s the goat in all its glory:

Here’s the goat’s appearance in some of the TOJam games i’ve developed over the years:

Each TOJam also features a suggested theme. Past themes have included “Cheese”, “Scale“, and “Missing“. This year’s theme is “What Just Happened?” As i do every year, i’d like to riff on the TOJam theme and explore its possibilities.

Windbag

The very first thing that comes to mind when i hear “What Just Happened?” is Fred Willard in A Mighty Wind:

Wha’ Happened?? Ha ha ha ha. This is one of those movie lines i repeat all the time, and no one knows what i’m talking about. What are its ramifications for game design? None! But Fred Willard rocks my world.

WTFism

Like “Cheese”, the “What Just Happened?” theme gives a lot of room for WTFism. You can pack your game with ton of nonsensical crap that leaves the player saying “What Just Happened?” This is kind of a cop-out. Or maybe it’s because i’m old. i used to watch terrible movies and teevee shows just to laugh at them, but when you get old enough that you really start to feel your time on Earth is tragically limited, you tend to gravitate more towards entertaining yourself with stuff that’s actually worth your time.

The Scene of the Crime

A much more literal interpretation of the theme might involve a game where the player is shown the aftermath of an event, and has to work backwards to figure out what caused the event. This would likely be a plot-driven graphic adventure-style game, maybe in the vein of Déjà Vu, where you wake up in a bathroom stall with amnesia.

Unfortunately these days, starting a point n’ click game with amnesia is a hackneyed trope used in nearly every free Escape the Room Flash game i’ve played. At the risk of calling every game contrivance a cop-out, i’ll happily call this one out too: amnesia is a tired device that should be given a 10-year breather in video games, or until somebody can do something interesting with it.

In the case of the Escape the Room games, the situation’s even more dire, because the games all begin with “You are trapped in a room and you don’t know who you are”, and end with “You got out of the room!” There’s no character or plot development whatsoever … just a key inexplicably hidden behind a scrap of wallpaper, and a VCR code in the breakaway leg of the couch.

Memory Game

The trouble with a graphic adventure game where you’re trying to figure out What Just Happened is that it’s probably not going to be very replayable, and it has a big spoil factor on it. Take something like The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shamalamadingdong: if you haven’t seen it, and someone spoils the ending for you by revealing that Bruce Willis has a penis, you may not enjoy the movie when you finally get around to watching it. You may not even bother watching it at all.

Same deal with our hypothetical graphic adventure game: once someone tells you that What Just Happened is that the Evil Dr. Douchebag created a murder machine that killed everyone over five feet tall, and that THAT was the mysterious detail linking all of the survivors, the game might be less fun to play.

Here’s a less plot-heavy, more replayable game that’s simpler to program in a weekend: there’s a child’s memory game that we play at birthday parties, where you lay out a number of objects on the table. Everyone stares at the table for one minute. Then you tell all the kids to close their eyes, and you take an item away. The kids have to guess what’s missing.

What Just Happened? Mommy stole the fork.

Time-Bending

The past-tense of the What Just Happened theme may lend itself to a game involving time-bending or time-travel, a la Braid, or Back to the Future Part II on the NES.

Picture Super Mario Bros., and you show the player the level AFTER he’s gone through it: certain blocks are smashed, certain goombas are squished … and the player has to run through the level smashing all the same blocks and squishing all the same goombas in an effort to re-create the endgame state he’s just seen.

It would be way more interesting if you did this with more of a puzzle platformer, where there are switches and doors and traps and contrivances, which would make the re-creation far more interesting (ie “How did i get the pile of blocks to fall on top of that platform? What order do i have to do things in to get that to happen like that?”)

Word Association

You could bend the “rules” a bit and play around with the words in the theme. “What Just Happened?” could be the title about a Marmaduke-like dog named What.

Your game could be about a crusading judge on an alien planet, and you have to determine the ways in which he’s meted out justice by learning the aliens’ legal system. “What Thing that is Just Just Happened?” Meh. It’s a stretch.

And as long as i’m stretching:

Whatever you decide to pull together for your TOJam game, just keep in mind the rules i’ve learned from four previous jams:

1. Keep it simple enough to finish.
2. Finishing is everything.
3. If you want to get any love from players, either on the final night of the Jam or at the public TOJam Arcade, your game MUST be fast to learn, and easy to pick up and play. If you have to sit next to the player and explain how to control the game or what’s going on or what that squiggly shape is supposed to represent, you’ve failed. So:
4. Very strongly consider reserving a number of hours in the jam to build some sort of in-game tutorial to help the player understand your game, so that you don’t have to hand-hold.

i can’t tell you how many times i’ve sat down to play a TOJam game and have thought “What Just Happened?”, as in “how did a team of six people just spend an entire weekend building a game where i can’t figure out what the heck is going on?” This year, let’s keep the mystery of what just happened thematic, and create a great crop of games where the goals and controls are clear as crystal.

See you at the jam!

TOJam, you may know, is the Toronto Indie Game Jam, where sweaty nerds spend a weekend building games. The fifth anniversary of the event was my fourth time attending. If i could go back in time, i’d definitely attend the first one. i’d also give Hitler a purple nurple.

A month or so after TOJam, the organizers put together a public exhibition of the games called the TOJam Arcade. The game creators can use that time to fix whatever didn’t work by the end of the original weekend (which is usually everything.)

Beer.

This year’s arcade was held last Saturday night at the Imperial Pub near Yonge and Dundas Square. We succeeded in putting out the older barflies, who were pissed at not being able to watch their horse races, and the inebriated college crowd, who came precariously close to sloshing house draft on the data projectors.

Prizes.

At the end of the evening, they held a raffle with prizes comped by Big Blue Bubble, and some guy named Andy. They called my ticket number, and i was stunned to find i’d won the big prize of the evening – an Xbox 360 Elite bundle with Halo ODST, Forza 3, and a copy of Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia. It’s been over a decade since i’ve won something in a raffle, so it was a nice surprise. Thanks, Big Blue Bubble!

Soon after, they announced the People’s Choice Awards. Our game Heads was voted “Best Use of Theme”. The TOJam 5 theme was “missing”, and Heads is about a guy who wakes up to find that he’s literally lost his head. It was a really nice and unexpected win, but i think some other teams came up with far more subtle and clever uses of the theme. (Don’t get me wrong, though – i’m not complaining!)

After struggling to balance the Xbox home on my bike through rain-slicked streets, i went to lock up in the bike room and found a ten dollar bill on the floor. True. That actually happened. It all made me feel bad for kicking that kitten in the face earlier in the day.

Other Non-Me Winners

The top three Peoples Choice games included Nom Nom Nom Nom (a Hungry Hungry Hippos clone with three cats and a goat), MonoClimb, the black-and-white co-operative platformer by prize-donating Andy and friends (i mentioned it in my last TOJam article), and Last Hadron Collider, a two-player simultaneous obstacle race with randomly-generated levels and great-looking character sprites. You’ll be able to play all these games and more at the TOJam site once everything is uploaded.

Once the games are up, i’ll write another post listing my own People’s Choice picks with some undiscovered gems. In the meantime, i’ll try not to let our productivity on Spellirium take too much of a hit, now that we can finally put those extra Rock Band instruments to use at the office.

This year’s event, the fifth annual, was held at the new George Brown campus on the second floor of the Autodesk building, where i taught Flash in the school’s new game development program before opening my big fat mouth. The facility is brand-spanking new as of January, with four classrooms filled with obscenely powerful computers running Maya, Max, Flash, Photoshop, and all the other goodies you could hope for. Jammers had the choice of using the school’s computers or bringing their own. i was tucked into one of the two classrooms where the monstrous monitors had been removed, and we set up our own equipment.

The turn-out this year was huge. The 180 slots were handily packed up, with another 20 or so on the waiting list. The sponsors, including Tall Tree Games and Big Blue Bubble, kept jammers stoked with junk food – candy bars, energy drinks, chips, Chinese food, and pizza. Two jammers brought in their own baked goods, including chocolate chip oatmeal cookies and 200-odd cheese tarts. My body was screaming for a sprig of broccoli by the end of it -i nearly ate the foliage outside the building to keep from passing out. But cheese is a definite crowd-pleaser.

Exodus from ScaryTown

There were some misgivings, including by the organizers themselves, that the Jam had lost its soul by moving out of Innovation Toronto, a terrifying warehouse in the rapey-est part of town where the last two Jams were held. i disagree – i think the only thing we lost by not being in that building was the constant threat of tetanus. This year, the toilets worked, the stairwells were devoid of dead rodents, and no one had to climb on the roof to secure a tarp over the skylight to keep the rain out. The only real drawback was the classroom layout of the campus, which meant that we couldn’t all be together in the same room. But as the Jam gets bigger, i think that’s just going to be a necessity … unless and until the organizers attain the legendary goal of booking the Toronto Convention Center for the event.

Every year, the organizers choose a theme to guide the teams’ creative output. This year, the theme was “Missing”. Apparently, what i was missing was the focus and wherewithal to produce a decent game. i found the theme really challenging this year, and i’m so focused on our current project that i worry my heart wasn’t completely in it.

But some teams’ hearts WERE in it, in a big way. Here are a few of the games that i enjoyed playing during the Sunday night wrap-up:

Throw That Fight!

This was my fave game at the event. It was very clever. It had a 1930′s theme and style. You play a pugilist who has to throw his boxing match for some reason involving an orphan … the story copy was a bit screwed up at the beginning so i missed the rationale, but what followed was my favourite line from the game from your trainer: “Remember your signature punches: up, left, and right.” (HAHAHAHAHA!)

So it was a rhythm game with the exact same mechanic as Elite Beat Agents, except that you weren’t allowed to play it properly, because you’d accidentally win the match and punch the other guy out. And you couldn’t play like ass either, because the game would say you made it look too unconvincing. You had to screw up the rhythm game just enough to throw the fight, and to not let on that you were playing badly on purpose. FUN.

It wasn’t an incredibly compelling game that i could play for hours, but it was a perfect snack-sized experience for the Jam. i got the concept from the title alone, and figuring out how to play properly was a joy. Good work!

Rider Saves the World

Crazy French-Canadians. This game was from a visiting Montrealer (was his name Rennault?) who created a pretty uninspiring obstacle avoidance game that was delightful in spite of itself, thanks to its ridiculous writing and theme.

You play Rider Motorcycleson, a 70′s-style biker with an afro and a red headband, charging through space astride an angry-looking missile, on his way to save his love. In the second level, you have to take down an alien mothership. The cut-scene introducing that level includes the line by the aliens “We are going to destroy you etc.” i laughed HARD. The cut-scene for the third level is a one-liner where your girlfriend simply says “i’m pregnant.” Again, it had me in stitches. But maybe i was overtired?

The game had some nice touches. When you died, each Continue screen borrowed the mechanic from the level that preceded it. The graphics were very silly. The gameplay was varied. The creator was insane. Lots of pluses there.

i guess i’ve learned that i really favour games with funny writing. Hmm!

Platform Game

i didn’t catch the name of this one, but it was fun. It’s 2-player game with one black character and one white character. You have to co-operate with the other player to reach the top of the vertically-scrolling screen by jumping on platforms. Platforms are either black, white, or beige. The black and white platforms are transparent and you fall right through them, unless the black or white character is standing on the platform. So the black guy could jump up and stand on a transparent black platform to make it solid, so that the white guy could jump up and join him. It was a constant back-and-forth between the players, who essentially had to open doors for each other throughout the level to reach the top. Very nice! And in a few instances, you and your partner had to communicate to time a jump together so that you’d both wind up on the same platform at the same time. It was just pure, wholesome, playable fun. Well done!

My hat’s off to so many people this year – from the organizer who put on this incredible event with NO CHARGE to the participants (??!), to the teams who turned out some great (and many horrendous) games, and to nine of my former students who showed up to give it a shot. (It was great to see them taking the initiative that i accused them of lacking!) Thanks to everyone i met this year, and i hope we can continue to foster a relationship through the monthly Toronto Hand Eye Society meetings until the next jam.

The TOJam Arcade, the public exhibition of the games that were created at the event, is coming up next month. Be there!

Further Playing

The TOJam 5 games will be up on the site eventually. In the meantime, here are the titles i created in past jams:

TOJam 2: Two by Two

Related articles:

• Pimp My Game

TOJam 3: Here Be Dragons

Related articles:

• Pump Up the Jam
• Veni, Vidi, Video Game
• Jonesin’ for Indie-ana
• Stop: Jammer Time.

TOJam 4: Bloat.

Related articles:

• De Fine Balance
• TOJam 4 Closes Its Doors
• The Making of Bloat.
• The Torontoist Tackles TOJam

TOJam 5: Heads (coming soon!)

• Something’s Missing at TOJam 5

• The Torontoist: Ankle Deep in TOJam

The piece is expertly written and does a great job of capturing the mood of the warehouse space, the anxiety during the final hours of development, and the tortured genius of Jimmy McGinley. i’m referenced briefly as the guy with the gecko idea, but Jim steals the show with his concept of characters crawling up a disgusting old man’s back.

At one point, the author notes

Most of TOJam’s participants were either involved in selling their own games (though not, we should note, their TOJam games)

He clearly didn’t get a chance to interview all ninety jammers (his count was eighty-nine, but number ninety late-entry was a musician floater who happened to live nearby). i’ve actually been trying to sell my first TOJam game, Two By Two, for the past year with horrendous results. Read all about it in a series we call Pimp My Game.

The one place where the article lost me was its thesis that indie gaming was without a home in Toronto. What home could indie gaming possibly have? Should everyone who attends the jam quit their jobs and pack into an incubator somewhere, to make piles of interesting but commercially poisonous games? To me, pulling an all-nighter in a ramshackle warehouse in Corktown next to an array of tube TVs with their live wires exposed, and deciding between the bathroom down the hall or the one where the door doesn’t close all the way, is the very definition of indie. You want to pull ridiculous hours next to properly flushing toilets AND get paid doing it? Go work for UbiSoft.

i spent a lot less time on this year’s game than i did with my other entries, Two By Two and Here Be Dragons – Bloat. clocked in at around twenty-two hours. i took time out of the schedule for luxuries like eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom. As Laurence Olivier said to John Hurt in the 1983 version of Shakespeare’s King Lear, “i’m getting too old for this shit.” Still, at the risk of being labelled a big girl’s blouse, i did pull an all-nighter from 11AM Saturday to 1AM Monday, racking up a total of two and a half hour’s sleep. i still got it, baby.

Peer Pressure

When i got to the jam on Friday night, i had my plan down semi-solid: armed with a MacBook and a copy of Beginning iPhone Development (i’m on chapter four!), i was going to churn out a few small not-really-game iPhone apps by the end of the weekend. So i sat down, cracked the book, and started reading all about model view controllers and Interface Builder, and view states and multi-view panel buttons and snoooooooooooore. All around me, enthusiastic jammers were yelling stuff like “score!” and “player!” and “enemies!” and “hot coffee!” at each other, and i started to feel a little left out.

So i calmly closed the book, and opened up the trial copy of Unity that i’d just downloaded. i already knew how to make a box fall from the sky and land on the ground. That’s, like, halfway to a game … right? And all around me, the game banter continued: “extra lives!” “state machine!” “Robotron controls!” “EA spouse!” The din was deafening, and i’d forgotten my headphones.

This was no place to learn new software. This was no place to struggle with an unfamiliar operating system. This was the mother-effing Toronto Game Jam, and i was there to make a GAME. So i lit the MacBook on fire and threw it across the room, took off my pants and tied them around my hair like a headband, booted up my PC laptop and opened Flash. i was there to make a game, and nothing was going to stop me.

A Dark Room

i’d promised myself that this year, i was going to go into the game jam cold, with no game ideas and a commitment to the year’s theme. The theme this year was “scale”. Little did i realize that actually cooking up an idea right there on the spot was going to be challenging. A weekend-long jam requires a lot of planning; you have to choose a game idea that you can build in that tight amount of time, and what’s worse, it actually has to be playable. And on top of that, and completely optionally, it also has to be fun. Since fun is that just-out-of-reach jewel that we game developers stretch for when we have a lot more time to think it through, the jam presents a significant level of challenge.

So i went into a dark room and thought for nearly two hours. When i emerged, i had a concept, but i didn’t have any idea whether it was good or not. The only way to find out was to build it.

A Little Help

When i first attended the game jam, i didn’t have any libraries or prior code. i just opened up a fresh Flash project and started building. i knew that other people were using pre-existing libraries, and i considered that “cheating”. These days, though, i’ve caught glimpses of how other programs work, and i now appreciate the number of tasks that Flash automates for the developer. For example, other languages require lines and lines of code just to draw something to the screen. Flash handles this for you. So really, i had been using a tool to speed up development all along.

So from there, and with the enormous asspains presented by Actionscript 3, i was able to justify the use of a few more libraries this year, which helped me focus on the core game experience. Here are the snippets i used:

1. Corey O’Neil’s excellent Collision Detection Kit (thanks, Corey!)
2. Jeff Gold’s audio classes for playing music and sound effects (Jeff is our game developer here at Untold Entertainment, but he couldn’t make the jam this year. Something about nice weather and “having a life”.)
3. Our Game Screen Manager class, which handles switching between screens and popping up prompts and dialogues
4. Our Helper class, the guts of which you can copy-paste from our Flash 911 series to use in your own projects
5. A fireworks particle effect that i found online and ported from AS2 to AS3 for our fun, crime-themed puzzle game Kahoots™, which we modeled entirely in clay

The Result

i’m very happy with how Bloat. turned out! The biggest brainwave of the weekend was looking at all of the features i had in the game, and deciding to split them out across multiple tutorial levels. i remember watching in dismay at last year’s jam as people walked up to Here Be Dragons, clicked until they got some ship rigging stuck in the sea monster’s throat, couldn’t figure out what to do, and floated away to try another game. If there’s one thing i’ve learned is a weakness of mine as a designer, it’s getting what’s in my head out of my head.

The Closed Public Beta team for Kahoots™ is doing an excellent job of pointing out where Kahoots game needs more explanation. The best advice i can offer you, if you have this problem too, is:

1. Make your game more simple
2. Introduce escalations gradually
3. Treat your audience as if they ride the short bus

Your players aren’t stupid. (Well, most aren’t … ) But they can’t read minds either. By dumbing down your instructions and game progress into digestible chunks, you’re allowing the smart people to sail through to the more difficult content, without leaving your less savvy players in the dust. Either way, you ensure that absolutely everything that was in your brain is out of your brain, and everyone’s on the same footing.

Until i develop and convince everyone to purchase and install my mind control ray, this approach will have to do.

• Talk about Bloat. on the message boards!

(Team photos were all taken by the super-talented Brendan Lynch, and unceremoniously snaked from his Flickr site. Environment photos come courtesy of Benjamin Rivers, who expertly captured the quirkiness of the Innovation Toronto space. You can see his whole collection here)

TOJam is the premiere game creators’ event in Toronto. A group of local developers – professionals, hobbyists and students – cloister themselves together for a weekend to make games. People work as individuals, as teams, or as floaters. Floaters are hired guns, mostly artists and musicians, who are drafted via sign-up sheets to create title screens, character animations and background tracks for the games. A late sign-up announcement and scheduling conflict with student exams brought the participation down this year, but TOJam 4 still drew ninety game devs for a weekend of full-frontal nerdity.

Teams, Themes and Lucid Dreams

Every year, the organizers choose a theme to help guide and unify the games. This year’s theme was “scale”. Before the jam, i brainstormed a number of uses of the word, and i received some flack from the other jammers when i suggested that “big stuff/little stuff” was the most uncreative deployment of the theme. And then i went ahead and created a big stuff/little stuff game. But i’m a worthless hack, so please don’t ever listen to me.

This year, it seemed like people were really playing fast and loose with the time. The jam space was largely empty for huge pockets of the weekend (most notably Saturday and Sunday AM), and as a result, it seemed that a much larger number of the games didn’t get finished. At the Sunday night show n’ tell, i got around to seeing most of the games. There were a few stand-outs:

Cheeseohol 2: The Actual Game

Team Happy Rainbow Panda Bears couldn’t let go of last year’s “Cheese” theme and created a sequel (read: finished last year’s game), calling it Cheeseohol 2: The Actual Game. You play a block of Swiss cheese scaling a mountain, throwing pick axes at bouncing goats-on-poles. A unique mouse-wheel control had you carefully metering out the number of shots you could fire, requiring you to carefully preserve your ammo for tougher goats. The game has a silhouetted Patapon-inspired look.

Pandemic! You Have Gone Viral

Team Awesomo, comprised largely of snaggle-toothed street vagrants, created Pandemic! You Have Gone Viral. It’s a four-player XNA game where your ammo buzzes around the screen using a flocking algorithm. You run around trying to catch the bird-like bullets to fire them at other players. The feedback was problematic with this one – it didn’t seem like i actually had control over whether the bullets stuck to me or not, and there wasn’t much visual feedback signifying that the characters were taking damage. The real hook with this game was a eye-poppingly gorgeous artwork, displayed on a five million-inch LCD monitor.

Scale Mountain

Team Stinker created a game called Scale Mountain, where you play a mountain climber collecting inexplicably mountain-strewn gems (?) while avoiding such perils as hawks, bears, and spiders. It reminded me of a scene from the Sierra Online adventure game The Black Cauldron, where Taran scales the castle wall on the way to defeat the Horned King. The team included a grappling hook mechanic and multiple levels with different graphics … i think they said five? Wow. The game is very large (i spent five minutes working through level 1), and punishingly difficult! Often, there was a large gem sitting right on top of an enemy. Harsh. The graphics and sound are rough, but Scale Mountain was still one of the most playable, enjoyable games at the jam.

Ass-Smashingly Awesome Ball Game

My absolute favourite game at TOJam 4 is a 2D game where your character is a ball. You click the left button on either side of the ball to roll in that direction, and right-click to jump. The level has a series of ramps and platforms that you have to get the ball through. The real innovation here, and the best use of “scale” i saw at the whole jam, is that you can roll the mouse wheel to scale the level bigger or smaller, but the ball stays the same size. So if there’s a tight gap that your ball can’t fit through, you scale the level up until the opening is wide enough. If your ball reaches a monstrous chasm, just scale the level down and roll over the tiny gap. Awesomazing! This was the only game at the jam that really surprised and delighted me, particularly when i thought i had made it through the whole level – my ball just stopped at a dead-end wall – and the developer said “now zoom in really close”. i spun the mouse wheel, and a complicated network of platforms and ramps grew up all around my ball, a whole level section that had been shrunk down to 1/100th of the size. Amazing!

Mothering

This year, as every year, i have to hand it to the organizers, who pull off this amazing organizational feat purely out of the goodness of their hearts (and to pay off their debt to mafia-connected bookies). The amount of self-sacrifice involved in every TOJam staggers me, whether it’s a toilet that needs plunging, a fuse that needs fixing, or an underslept developer who needs a ride home. At one point, i saw organizer Jimmy McGinley tear open his shirt and suckle a crying baby. The personal care and attention that the organizers provide is one key reason why they can announce an event so late, and still pack the place with ninety people. In my estimation, this was the best game jam evar.

Bloat.

Look for our new game, Bloat., on the site later this week!

i was a little surprised that no one went for the broader definition of cheese, a la “camp” or “corn”.

This year’s theme is SCALE, which offers many more possibilities. i thought i’d run down the different uses of the word to provide this year’s Jammers with some inspiration:

1. To Climb

Make a game about:

• scaling a building (Rampage, anyone?)
• scaling a wall (like Achilles in the Trojan War! … or Spider-Man, for you plebs)
• scaling a rock face of a mountain

2. A Horny Skin Plate

Make a game about:

• a snake!
• a lizard!
• a fish!
• a pangolin! Because they’re weird.

3. To remove plaque from the teeth.

Make a game about:

• An amateur dentist (i think Adult Swim already did this, but i can’t find the link)

4. A device for weighing things.

Make a game about:

• Weighing things! (the best example i can think of is at VectorPark – click the icon with the snowman)
• the astrological Libra sign is a pair of scales. Some kind of horoscope game/
• the figure of blind justice holds a pair of scales
• the Wii Balance Board is a (barely) high-tech bathroom scale

5. A representation of proportionate size.

This is the one that comes to mind most naturally, i think. Make a game about:

• things that are big and things that are little. (yawn)
• i dunno. This is the most obvious one, so it’s the least appealing to me.

6. A graduated system of wages or rates.

As in “pay scale”. Do a game about:

• Santa’s elves viciously competing for corporate bonuses
• a union worker bumping off employees with more seniority so that he can earn a higher wage
• a tycoon game about managing the wages of sweatshop workers

7. An ordered progression of musical notes.

Make a game about:

• That scene from the Sound of Music where Julie Andrews teaches the children to sing “do re me”. ACTION-PACKED!!
• Some crazy avoid-the-obstacle game that takes place on top of a gigantic piano keyboard. Remember Bumble Boogie?

There are other definitions, i’m sure. My point is that before you do some take on Shadow of the Colossus this weekend at the Jam, consider your options! They are many and varied.

TOJam is this weekend, May 1-3 2009 in Toronto. Spots are limited, so sign up now!

Newgrounds is an American Flash Portal created by the people, for the people … and by “people”, i mean mostly adolescent boys and similarly-minded men who revel in exploitative content created in Flash. This content includes pornographic, copyright-infringing, gratuitously violent and often morally insensitive (see the site’s various Virginia Tech massacre-inspired content) web games and animations.

The site frustratingly caters to the lowest common denominator, when the site’s founder Tom Fulp has actually turned out a very strong game with Castle Crashers, the sophomore follow-up to Alien Hominid, which was the first Flash game to appear on a major home video game console. i wasn’t such a big fan of Alien Hominid, and was actually pretty surprised that the ESRB would give it a Teen rating, what with all the decapitation. But to each his own, i suppose. Maybe the graphics were just too darn cute?

Submit!

The Newgrounds submission process is very painless – moreso than MochiAds or Kongregate. You fill out a form with a bunch of options to indicate authorship (the site encourages “collabs” – collaborations between site members), and credits for any audio you’ve used from the site’s audio repository. There’s also a section where you can self-rate your content. This is more in the spirit of reassuring viewers or players of all the dirty stuff they’re going to see, because there are no actual measures taken on the site to caution minors about viewing that content. So kids are free to watch, for example, the Teletubbies parody “Pojo Gets Wit a Ho”, or the action packed “Space Slut Slim”. Ssssuper.

The fact is that most of the Newgrounds content that is inappropriate for minors is actually created by the minors for whom the content is inappropriate.

The site does draw the line at uploading *real* pics of people having sex, a measure which it’s clear to point out is only “due to new laws.” Newgrounds also discourages users from uploading child pornography. It’s good to know that a site that hosts “Dirty C*nt”, “Donkey vs. Bitch”, and “Suicide Can Be Fun” draws that moral line somewhere.

So when it came to uploading Two By Two to Newgrounds, i didn’t expect much love for a light puzzle game that kicks off – unironically – with a Bible verse, on a site where animated debauchery reigns. In order to actually make money from posting your content to Newgrounds, you have to implement their advertising API. i believe i could have uploaded the MochiAds-enabled version of Two By Two, but Pimp My Game is all about putting different monetization methods through their paces. So off i went.

API API Joy Joy

Integrating the Newgrounds API was very painless in AS3. There are only three lines of code, which you place at the beginning of the movie, and then Bob’s your uncle. (This is to say that once you press the “Submit” button, a man named Robert actually marries your mother’s sister.)

The most time-consuming part of the NG API integration is setting up custom events. These are trigger points that you define on the Newgrounds site and activate with a single line of code for each event. Once these hooks are in, you can visit the site and see a report on how often each custom even was called. (This is all in theory – i never did figure out exactly where on the site i could view the data for these events.)

There are all kinds of things you could conceivably track in your game – anything from “Passed level x with y lives” to “pressed the Quit button during level x”. It’s all stuff that can help you to better understand the users’ experience with your game. For example, if you realize that 50% of your players are running out of time and dying in level two, perhaps you can re-jig level two and update the game?

The Newgrounds custom events are a nice idea, but if you’re going to pimp your game, you’re better off tracking events with a third party – Google Analytics, for example. That way, it won’t matter where your game is hosted – you can track events from anywhere on the Internatz. As you’ll see during our numbers round-up below, the time i spent setting up these custom events was not worth the exposure i received on Newgrounds.

The final step to rigging up your game with Newgrounds ads is to pass staff approval, where i assume a real live person scans your game for content that miscellaneous advertisers may not enjoy (ie “Tits in the Forest” or “Murder the Government”, both currently playing on Newgrounds.) A Newgrounds inspector apparently gave Two By Two the thumbs-up.

The Result

i’ve given Newgrounds more time than any other featured Pimp My Game monetization method. The game was uploaded in on December 21st 2008, and the date stamp on this article puts us near the end of April – a full four months to let the masses pour over the game and bathe it in hot sweaty ad rev-share cash.

597 plays, with an average score of 2.75/5.00. 38% of players rated the game. It’s worthwhile to note that all of these numbers were charted within the first three days of the game appearing on the site; the game has since dropped completely out of view, and has experienced four solid months of complete radio silence. One way to get extra love for your game on Newgrounds is to promote it within the site forums. But frankly, i’m above baselessly begging people to play Two By Two and talking about it ad nauseum to other people on the Internatz. Wink.

The game garnered three written reviews, which i repost here for your spiritual edification:

Score: 10 “Good!” Great game man , this one is going in my favs!

Score: 5 “Meh.” its not too great and very boring

Score: 3 “Only one level???” To be quite honest I thought this game was weak. I aint being harsh on you but puzzle games are not something that attracts alot of people unless it is very good and unique…. but overall this game is not that great. I am sorry for sounding very harsh but this aint gnna do well.

i’m not sure why, even with a meagre 500-odd plays, there were zero ad impressions for the game. Does the Newgrounds API even work? Do the Custom Events work? Are we using any of this stuff properly? Maybe Tom can pop on here and explain.

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at the overall numbers for Two By Two which, thanks entirely to MochiAds, have climbed steadily (and pathetically).

The Graph

With its forty hour TOJam development period, Two By Two has earned me an hourly wage of 56 cents – not counting the hours spent integrating APIs, creating thumbnails for each portal and uploading the game to their exacting and non-standardized standards.

Keep in mind that this is seventy virtual dollars that i’ve earned. Each different site has a payout cap – MochiAds doesn’t pay until you hit $100. So although my readers in Bangladesh must be idolizing me for the amazing wad of cash they imagine i’m rolling around in, bear in mind that i haven’t seen a penny of actual money yet. The MochiAds numbers come in at around $0.30/day … by my calculations, i should see a cheque from them after Tuesday August 4th of this year, roughly foour months from now.

Epilogue

Newgrounds is a site that caters mostly to young boys gettin’ their kicks, with tits n’ guns as their favourite subject matter. Kids’ shows are a favourite target; a conspicuous amount of the Newgrounds games and animations are of the “Kill Barney” variety. This is likely a rite of passage for the age group – putting aside childish things and adopting more “mature” forms of entertainment which include sex and violence. This denouncement of kid content is carried out very literally by having a character violently murder Elmo, or sodomize Thomas the Tank Engine.

It’s not my world. i don’t need to assert my adulthood by creating or watching this kind of content. i get all the sex and violence i need at home: first, by having sex with my wife and creating children, and second, by having said children stomp on my scrotum during independent play time. i need money to feed that family, and to pay for our mortgage, and to afford ice packs to soothe my swooning groin. That’s what Pimp My Game is all about – determining whether i can generate respectable income making original games.

i don’t have time to sit around designing a 7-part animated series about action heroes raping beloved childhood icons. The rewards on Newgrounds are community “glory” and no actual profit.

Newgrounds is not for me. And i’m not even sure it’s a decent also-ran in our growing list of monetization schemes. It’s a portal where content of a certain ilk will get noticed and talked about, while the creators of sanitized casual games should save their efforts for other sites.

Keep watching this feature for more info on monetizing your Flash games! If you missed the other articles, catch the rest of Pimp My Game here!

TOJam Arcade
Friday June 6th
7PM – Midnight

The Blue Moon Pub
Queen St. East (near Broadview)

Save your quarters – admission’s free!

View Larger Map

37 games … 157 developers … some of the hottest, sweatiest nerds in Toronto gaming … and ladies, they’re siiingle!!’.

(Yes. All of them.)

i don’t want to spoil all the suprises, but here’s a sampling of the unbridled joys in store for you on that fateful day:

• smack pirates around with a dead fish using the Rock Band drum peripheral
• pit two mice with rocket launchers against a column of cheese nuggets
• flail around the office as a grotesquely disjointed desk jobber who’s abandoned all hope
• murder slices of Swiss by throwing them against the wall, and lay them in their final crackery resting places
• abuse the limits of one game’s physics to achieve a “goatality”
• survive twenty seconds in a room full of zombies before finally finding an uzi
• mash the keyboard to survive an insect uprising
• randomly click the mouse buttons and shriek with delight

The third annual TOJam event wrapped late last night. This year, around 125 developers crammed into a scary warehouse at the edge of town to spend one weekend creating all kinds of video games about cheese. Cheese was this year’s theme. Some developers, like Shawn McGrath and myself were gung-ho to create non-cheese-related products (though for my part, my game contains poetry which is – at its core – terribly cheesy.)

Click to play the fruits of my labour, Here Be Dragons.

Due to some project-related obligations, i wrote to the organizers on Friday and cancelled my participation, forfeiting my spot at the Jam. But fairy tales can come true, and by the end of the day, all the fires had been put out on the project. i packed an extra monitor into my knapsack and biked it down to a dodgy part of the city apparently dubbed “Corktown”, but better known by locals as “ugh.”

Building Games in a Mafia Dumping Ground

When i rolled up to the derelict factory, it was immediately familiar. i had been there before, for a meeting with a pair of Facebook app developers called Refresh Partners. Back then, the place reminded me of the warehouse where Batman knocked Jack Napier (AKA the Joker) into a vat of acid. Apparently, scenes from Chicago were filmed there, as it offered that perfectly gritty bleak brick prison motif.

By luck of the draw, i had one of the better rented chairs in the building, because it had working wheels and armrests. Well – armrest, really, because one of the armrest cushions was missing. The chair owner had jury-rigged a new armrest by binding bunched-up bubble wrap to the chair with electrician’s tape. This assembly, as functional as it was, betrayed the danger of a hidden nail sticking straight up through the wrap. Thank God that my tetanus shots were up to date. i’m willing to suffer slings and arrows for my craft, but i draw the line at lockjaw.

We came and went via a back stairwell, which was home to a dead mouse and numerous other unmentionables that, fittingly, i won’t mention. The hundred-odd (and i do mean “odd”) participants were spread out between two rooms, one of which was stiflingly hot and the other which was freezing cold, thanks to windows that wouldn’t close. i was set up much better than most folks, some of whom were clustered around a shared folding table beneath a fluorescent lighting fixture that hanged precariously from one bolt.

Sleep When You’re Dead

After riding home for some sleep at 2:30 Friday morning, i stayed awake from Saturday morning at 9:30 to Sunday night at 11:00 PM, when the event ended. Being without my air mattress, which i found indispensable last year, i tried to take a nap while lying across three chairs lined end to end, but i was constantly awoken by the carpenter downstairs who spends his early mornings loudly slamming piles of wood together arhythmically. i troddled off to the hotbox room to snooze there, but that part of the building was emitting some strange beeping noise loud enough to keep me awake. At last, there came a vacancy on one of the dodgy couches in the nearby makeshift lounge, but by that time i was too tired to sleep.

That said, i was much more relaxed this year than last, although i think i stayed up the same number of hours. Compare and contrast this year’s photo from last year’s (also by Lynch):

The key difference, i think, is that last year i was determined to prove myself. i wanted to show the world – and particularly my team supervisor – that locking me up writing game documentation for two years was a waste of my talents. To that end, i was dead-set on creating a finished, functional game if it killed me. And it nearly did.

My success this year started with my cancellation. i figured that having missed a day, there was no point in even showing up. With the pressure relieved, i was able to really take my time and tune into the game design process, without worrying so much about being perfect.

The Game

The game i chose to build was one from our internal game ideas wiki called Here Be Dragons. Here’s what the wiki entry looked like:

Sea Monster

It’s Like
That spider game in the junkyard where you pull the spider back like a slingshot to grab flies.

Overview
You’re a sea monster eating ships.

Not much to go on. The entry was in there just to remind me that i really wanted to make a sea monster game. Simple concepts make for simple games. Simplicity is crucial to turning out a finished title in a weekend.

The spider game i referenced was a great little Flash game i remember playing a few years back. You play a daddy long legs in a junkyard. You click and drag the spider’s body to jump up in the air and eat insects. The game was technically very impressive; the spider’s legs programmatically contoured to the shape of the terrain. The artwork was also quite nice. If anyone has a link to the game, please let me know!

i figured the same pull-back-and-release mechanic would be great in a sea monster game. Your monster waits at the bottom of the sea. Pull back and release to swim up breach the water. If there are any boats in your way, you eat them. Bonus points for eating one boat on the way up, and another boat on the way back down.

This all sounded good in my head until i actually started looking at pictures of sea monsters. Somehow, i had forgotten that they were all slinky and snake-like. A mathematical springy game mechanic is one thing, but add to that some chain physics, and suddenly the task seemed daunting. i’m no math wizard, and i never took trigonometry (though i’m aiming to fix this gaping hole in my understanding within the year).

i thought about the game for weeks leading up to TOJam, and eventually conceived of a game where the sea serpent is stationary and the boats move past it. All i’d need is a locked chain mechanic. This seemed a lot more reasonable.

Math for the Numerophobic

i started with an excellent Flash chain physics tutorial by Alejandro Quarto. His example contained all the trig i’d need to find the distances and angles between the sea monster’s neck segments.

In Alejandro’s example, the chain segments detect and prevent collision against each other. This was the first aspect i dropped, because it wasn’t important for my monster’s neck to collide with itself. Instantly, my chain moved much more smoothly. The trouble was that i needed a chain anchored to one point, but Alejandro’s chain was free-floating.

Here’s how Alejandro’s chain works: the last ball in the chain follows the mouse. As it’s being pulled around, all subsequent balls look for a larger-than-acceptable gap between themselves and the previous ball in the chain. If the gap is too large, a ball will tighten that gap by moving along the angle between itself and its companion ball. The gap that Alejandro set is the distance between the balls’ centrepoints, so you get a nice tight chain. (For the sea monster game, i tightened the chain even further so that the segments had more overlap.)

In order to affix the chain to one spot, i had to reverse Alejandro’s logic. First, i told the end segment to stay put. Then i told all subsequent segments to follow the mouse. Finally, i reinstated Alejandro’s logic to keep the each ball from straying too far from its parent segment. i kept the ball shape for the segments because circle segments look the most fluid when bent.

The end result is a really fantastic-looking and -feeling segmented sea monster neck. Thanks, Alejandro!

Programming in a Snap

Finishing off the rest of the game logic was a piece of cake. i made an early decision to angle the sea monster’s head as it followed the mouse, which players really reacted to. There was no magic to it:

i just chose a line down the middle of the sea monster, and chose a distance to either side. If the head was within that threshold, it showed its “forward” graphic. Otherwise, it showed its “left”- and “right”-facing graphics depending on which side of the threshhold it was on.

For the y axis, it was the same deal. When the head is within the middle threshhold, show the “straight” graphic. Otherwise, show the “up” or “down” graphic.

This provided the illusion of the sea monster looking around as its head follows the mouse. It’s not a technically brilliant scheme, but it is graphically labour-intensive, requiring nine pictures of the head (six actually, because the “left” pictures could be flipped for the “right” side). Then double that, because each head picture had to have a “mouthOpen” and “mouthClosed” state. Then add a few more pictures of the head with pursed lips for when the sea monster spits out the ship rigging. Finally, i lost the benefit of mirrored images when i added some shadows and highlights later.

Here are all the head images:

Gameplay Polish

The game was pretty well finished by Saturday night, and i had the rest of the weekend to add polish and to playtest. i had a few TOJam organizers sit down with Here Be Dragons. Jim thought the sea monster’s tongue was a laser, and so he didn’t grasp the fundamental game mechanic or goal. To fix this, i took his suggestion and changed the monster’s tongue from purple to pink. Then i added a chunk of code to depict the things the monster was eating being retracted into its mouth; until then, you’d tongue-lash items on the boat and they’d disappear, leaving a more laser-like impression.

Emily wondered why she had to click to spit stuff out. Then i started to wonder that too, and i took it out – now you just have to look up to spit. Both Emily and Jim didn’t understand why the sea monster could eat the mast, sailors and crow’s nest, but not the sails. So i created a rule where anything fleshy was edible, and anything not-fleshy had to be spit out. (One exception is the ship’s hull, which is implied to be full of delicious, crunchy sailors).

Originally, there was only one sailor pacing around the deck. Jim wanted a whole pile of things to eat, so i added a sailor in the crow’s nest, a sailor belowdecks, and a captain in the stern of the ship. Interestingly, most players focus only on the pacing sailor, even though he’s more difficult to catch. i think this is because he’s the only sailor with a sound cue – footsteps on wood. Testament to the power of sound.

Early play tests revealed that it wasn’t clear that the sea monster was spitting anything out, so i added animation of things being spat and landing in the distance. i animated this programmatically, which took much more time than it would to hand-animate it.

When i conceived of the game, i thought the passing ships would shoot harpoons at the sea monster, and that i would have a lives/death/game over system. i asked the other developers whether the challenge of filling the monster’s stomach with hard-to-snag sailors was enough, and they said “sure”. “No scoring?” “Nope.” “No timer?” “Nope.” i came to regret listening to those opinions.

Graphical Polish

i had the luxury of sprucing up my flat graphics with a few more gradients and highlights. Here are some comparison shots:

The Result

The Big Reveal on Sunday evening is always exciting. You have some teams kicking back, relaxing and adding the finishing sparkle to their title screens, while other teams frantically, desperately try to get their core game mechanic to function properly. It’s the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat everywhere you look. When you cruise around to different stations looking for games to try, it’s always a little sad when you find an abandoned station with nothing to show for a weekend’s worth of toiling.

As usual, there were a lot of games that were too complex for their own good. You’d roll up to a station, and the developer would be there, looking all nervous, unable to abandon his post because his game was too complicated for people to figure out on their own.

“Okay okay! So, you put your fingers on the WASD keys to control the movement of the black triangle. Move the mouse to kiss the zombies. Click the mouse button to increase the number of units on the screen, and shift-click to make a sandwich. If you need to drop your superbomb, step on the Rock Band drum pedal. And to look around the room, tape this Wii remote to your forehead.”

i was determined to let my game speak for itself, so i wandered away from my station and kept an eye on players from a distance. i did have to tweak the sailors’ deliciousness level for the demo, because it was taking too long for people to get to the end of the game. Players would abandon the game in the middle of a session, and the next person would sit down in the middle of the game and miss out on the silly poetry that bookended the experience.

In the end, the changes that came from that late-night playtesting served the game very well, but i should have added a scoring system. i implemented the “YOU ATE:” tally screen within the final hour, hoping that the “hulls eaten” tally would inspire people to go back and try to eat an entire ship (the most difficult task in the game), but no dice: there were just too many other games to play.

Tips for Future First-Time TOJammers

Designing a game to hold someone’s frenzied attention span in a room full of nerds n’ noise is slightly different from designing a game to captivate and engage the player across many hours and repeat visits.

i recommend a dead-simple control scheme. Mouse is preferable to keyboard, and single-clicking trumps click-and-drag. i’m already not a fan of clicking and dragging, especially for kids’ games, although all my kids teevee clients ask for it. Interestingly, in the two second timespan it takes for you to sit down to a game and then abandon it, all but one of the TOJam3 games that required clicking and dragging were too obtuse for me to figure out on my own, and i didn’t spend any time with them.

The one exception was Happy Goat Lucky, which used the pull-back-and-release spring mechanic that i had initially planned to use for Here Be Dragons.

And lo, it comes full circle.

Break out the Cheetos

TOJam3, which starts tomorrow at 10AM, is an event where gluttons for punishment crowd into one room and set out to make a game in the course of one weekend. Over the past few weeks, i’ve invited many of my colleagues to register, and the response i most often received was “why on EARTH would i want to do THAT?”

Totally fair. If you spend your whole day making games, and then you’re invited to spend your whole weekend making games, i can see how it might be a turn-off. It’s a lot like when Jerry Seinfeld was dating that massage therapist and he kept trying to get her to give him a massage. If you spend all day doing it, it’s the last thing on your mind at the end of the day.

Things are different for folks like Jim, who bill themselves as hobbyist game designers. Jim works with computers all day, but he doesn’t make games. The TOJam mantra of “make a game already” is better suited to folks like Jim, who may have numerous game ideas swimming around in their brains, but always lack the time to put them into effect.

It’s a bit different on my side of the fence, where the grass is apparently greener, but my retinas have this bright green haze permanently burned into them and i can’t bear to look at the grass any longer. Like Jim and his ilk, i have tons of game ideas swimming around in my brain, and like Jim i lack the time to put them into effect because i make my bread and butter putting other folks’ game ideas into effect. The end result is that, given a whole weekend to finally work on my own game ideas, all i want to do is sit on a beach somewhere and drown myself in a pina colada.

What a Difference a Year Makes

Last year was different. Back when i worked for the Man, i spent my entire day writing use case documents and feature design documents and game design documents and technical design documents for a project where the people who actually got to build stuff didn’t, and so all my tedious and mind-numbing documents sat in a digital folder somewhere to collect digital dust. i appealed to my supervisors time and again “but i’m a game developer! Let me develop some games!!”, but my pleas fell on deaf ears.

So when TOJam2 rolled around last year, i went at it like a gamethirsty animal ready to rip a chunk of flesh off the first fleshy thing he laid eyes on. i was starved for game development, and i was very happy to complete a game that weekend. Making a game developer write documentation all day is like letting Cookie Monster smell cookies, but never actually touch or eat them. You know it’s going to end badly.

(interesting side note: by a hilarious fluke of mispronunciation, my toddler refers to the above-named Muppet as “Cookie Bastard”)

This weekend, i find myself desperately trying to carve out the time with a two year old daughter, a pregnant wife, and youth pastor duties at my local church on Friday night and Sunday morning. Add to that today’s client deadline, and it’s a miracle that i’ll be able to go to the event.

i’m Game. Barely.

All this to say that between blinks, i’ve agonized over what i’m actually going to build this weekend. Far from going in with a full game design document, i have only a vague plan to “borrow” some chain physics code from an actionscript site and bend it to my nefarious purposes. Whether or not i turn out a viable product this year as i did last year really remains to be seen.

Check out this space on Monday.

A Semi-Cultural Institution

i’m a big supporter of TOJam, having put in my own compacted 40 hours last year to produce Two by Two, a simple Noah’s Ark-themed matching game mapped to a cube. Other titles that resulted from last year’s jam included an anime-style giant robot fighting game, a few music rhythm games, an abstract geometric shooter, a Robotron-style actioner starring televangelist Benny Hinn, and far more besides.

i can’t list them all, because unfortunately the climax of the event is its weakest element; rather than showcasing each game in a spotlight session with a captive audience, attendees wander the room, tripping over empty Cheetos bags and passed-out developers, trying any games they happen upon. i missed about half of the games last year because some computers weren’t properly labelled, some machines were facing the wall, and some workstations smelled a little too strongly of three-day-old pepperoni sticks for me to approach.

TOJam2′s follow-up event last year was very well attended but very poorly organized. The good news is that this year’s event looks to be well-loved by its organizers, who are trying to arrange an arcade day where the public can try out all the titles. The TOJam site has been turned up to 11 this year, with an excellent section on what to do with your game when you’re finished. My kudos and thanks go to the organizers for a great list of links and resources.

Make a Game, Fatty

If you’ve got a game idea you’ve been back-burning and have any game-making skillz whatsoever, sign up now! Space is limited, especially if you’re morbidly obese, which you most likely are. TOJam organizers can provide you with two chairs if that’s the case.

So grab your cane, and slowly hoist yourself off your enormous rump. Go forth and game!