As we promised, here is a small chronicle of our trip to Copenhagen this weekend!
Nordic Game Jam is part of a larger international event known as the Global Game Jam. The Nordic Game Jam is the single biggest Jam with 290 registered developers in 2012.
Me and Fredrik took the train on Thursday, one day before the event started. Aboard, we met up with our friends Olle Lunddahl, Simon Gustafsson and Niklas Ström from Redgrim. It just happened to be Olle’s birthday so we made the entire train ride into a birthday party, complete with balloons, Champis, party hats and cake. We were off to a good start!
Despite of living less than three hours away, I’ve almost never been to Copenhagen before. The coolest thing we discovered almost immediately: Robots in the metro system. There are no humans operating the trains from a cockpit, it really gives the impression of a semi-intelligent master system. Very cool and a little creepy, it makes Stockholm’ metro system feel like that of a a third world country.
We installed ourselves at our hostel and proceeded to the IT-University of Copenhagen, where an introduction party was being held. We met several Danish developers as well as other former swedish students from BTH. It was all good fun and the eveneing ended up in one of the muskiest bars in all of Copenhagen – “The Moose”. Suffice to say, it was quite the feat to get out of bed the next morning, especially if your name was Olle.
Friday was filled with inspirational talks in the university, we listened to Petri Purho talk about making games with highly stylized and simple graphics. We also sat in on a talk about rapid prototyping in Unity, something that will come in handy this summer since I’m probably going to hold a course on the subject on BTH.
Finally, a couple of hours before announcing the game Sebastian Cederholm and Mikael Litendahl from DawnBreak Studios showed up, having traveled the entire day from Gothemburg.The theme was revealed and we formed two game jam groups: Simon, Olle and Niklas was team Redgrim. Me, Fredrik, Mikael and Sebastian formed team CoastalBreak (see what we did there?)
The theme was the Orobouros-symbol, a snake biting it’s own tail. We figured we wanted to make something about rebirth. We also decided to make the game for the windows phone 7 since that’s where we had the most common programming background (XNA).
We had quit a few different ideas, but many where to complex and vague. Finally, we decided to make a game about cutting plants in order to make them grow. You can see the end result below:
We had some problems with the collision detection and implementing XNA’s dodgy color collision on the phone. The games design was also iterated at least eight times, each iteration making it simpler and more in line with the features that actually worked atm! ^^
We had a lot of fun and we were all happy with the end results, though the last night between Saturday and Sunday was stressful. The snoring Spaniards sharing our hostel room didn’t help either – seriously I have never heard anyone snore in such an advanced and loud manner, think of someone duct-taping a chainsaw, power drill and hedge trimmer together and using them all at once.
Olle, Simon and Niklas took a different approach to their game. They made a game about life:
Simon Gustafsson’s Two and a fjers Men [Haha]
And not only that, they also gave a fantastic presentation of their game, made it to finals and actually WON the entire thing! Both the Audience Award and one of the Jury’s coice awards – meaning infinite amounts of drinking tickets and a very long night on the after-party for all of us ^^
Here are the links to both games:
And links to both http://dawnbreak.se/
As of this writing we are back in Sweden again, but we will meet again Denmark I am sure!
Lots of ove,
Marcus