Why Jam is Good for You!

February 21, 2012 //

27. to 29. of January, Moondrop, together with Sarepta Studio and Krillbite Studio, hosted Global Game Jam in Hamar, Norway. 62 participants came together over a weekend and together managed to craft these games.

We would like to thank everyone who showed up, contributed or hosted and I believe that it was a highly successful event! I must brag a little about the event in Hamar; good location, free entrance, good food (like pizza and waffles), plenty of space, good turnout and excited people.

If those reasons are not enough to convince you that jam is indeed good for you, let me elaborate!

As you might have guessed, the core of a game jam is that over a limited period, usually only a weekend, participants are attempting to create a game. At Global Game Jam that means either a digital game made on computers, or a board game. People get a theme that they must follow, so that all games should be created from “scratch”. You can use any development tool you are comfortable with as long as there is a legal license to use it.

Experimentation!
In our daily lives, we often have to “play it safe”. We might get some offbeat idea that you really find interesting, but you have other things to do that are easier to justify doing. Well, at a Game Jam you can throw all that out the window. Since the time span is so limited, you don’t have time to play it safe either way, so you might as well get as experimental as you can.
I love experiments! Finding out stuff, feeling like an inventor, breaking boundaries and expectations make me excited! About everything cool in the world was figured out by experimentation. Heck, even evolution is an automated process of experimentation!

Meet people!
When at least 3 game companies were going to show up at our site, global game jam can be a great place to network and meet people who works with games on a daily basis. The social aspect of at least Global Game Jam is something you don’t get to experience very often, with that many new people with so many different levels of experience all working on the same theme at the same time.

Fun!
Game jam is and should be FUN. Making something is a very rewarding and meeting new people is exciting. The pieces for fun is definitively present and it is something you don’t get to do everyday!

Experience!
I learn something valuable every jam! Not every part of a jam is equally fun, like bugs and cutting your favorite features, but those parts are usually very educational. Experience is something that you cannot think or read yourself to. Actually making games, make you better at making games! Positive feedback loop? Great! It is also the number one tip I have for anyone wanting to make games or get better at making games: start making them! I also believe that jams are a way to expand ones portfolio.

In conclusion, I like jams, as they are a fun way to hone skills, test out strange ideas and see what other people come up with. Global Game Jam is once a year usually at the end of January. There are other jams going on as well, like Ludum Dare, that is only over internet. So go jam, it’s good for you.

Tags game jam

Categories Everything else

Aftermoon

January 11, 2012 //

Although we did manage to enter the super finals with 4 other teams at NM i game play, we did not repeat last years success. Instead our friend Kristoffer won, which he truly deserved; congratulations! He has made a development blog for his game, and you can try a prototype he has put out.

As for our game, it has too many bugs to put out at the moment, and since we have a lot to do, don’t count on something playable anytime soon. (If we get a lot of requests, we might speed up that process).

We would also like to say that there were many other good contributions in the contest. It was fun, but we were a little too tired to enjoy the event to the fullest.

Here is a picture of our game showing two logs slowed down, making the main character able to use them as platforms.
Image of the NM game

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Oh, and join a Game Jam near you, it’ll be fun.

Categories Prototype

New Moon

January 4, 2012 //

So, we had to get some things of our chest in a fast and simple way. Here goes:

We have a new homepage, in English! And with it we updated Kesper’s Keep, the game we made for (and won us) the Norwegian nationals in gameplay 2011! New puzzles and better performance among other things. Check it out if you’re up for some puzzling and see if you can find the bonus levels.

A new year brings yet another global game jam and of course we’ll be bringing it all the way to Hamar again (27.-29. January). This time we also teamed up with Krillbite Studio and Serapta Studio who we share offices with, so it will be bigger than ever before! What else can you ask for than spending a weekend making games with good people and (some) free food? Check out the official page (gamejam.no) for more info and to signup.

We’re currently very busy working on a prototype for this years Norwegian nationals in gameplay which went above expectations last year and we are going to be interviewed by NRK tomorrow about that.

And other things. We will come back too that when we have more time.

A (late) happy new year to everyone!

Categories Uncategorized

Defining your own global functions and variables in ActionScript 3.0

December 3, 2011 //

A while ago I wanted to find out if you could define your own global functions in ActionScript 3.0. After a little searching I found an answer: use static members. Sure, its a global, but it didn’t quite answer my question, what if I wanted a global function like one of the built-in ones like ‘trace’ or ‘setInterval’? At the time it seemed like no one had even thought about it.

Well if AS3 had support for user defined global functions(and why shouldn’t it? the AS3 API contains several) it should be fairly easy to guess the syntax. So i wrote something like this:

package
{
  public function foo( ):void
  {
    trace( "bar" );
  }
}

and put it into a file called “foo.as”. And waddaya know, it worked! Also found out it worked for variables and constants, like so:

package
{
  public var someVar:int = 7;
}

package
{
  public const someConst:String = "baz";
}

Just make sure the file name matches the variable and that its in the correct source path.

I later discovered that Java does not support global standalone functions and variables. Since AS3 is influenced by Java maybe some people assume it would be the same.

Categories Uncategorized

It’s a blog!

November 20, 2011 //

It’s time for us to join the cool kids on the block and get down and dirty with a blog.

The content on this blog will probably be a bit scattered. We will have posts concerning our company and us, project updates and announcements as well as more techy kind of articles. I guess though that the overarching topic will be “Indie Game Development”. In the end we just want to share our knowledge, ideas and thoughts about stuff we care about.

To start off with a small note; ever wondered why we have a tree by our logo everywhere? Well, as you can read later in “The Chronicles of moondrop”, it’s an element from our past. Our first real game project was a “Bonsai simulator” (as we called it) and we made an early prototype for it that procedurally grow trees (or Bonsai).

Check out the Bonsai Simulator Prototype here!

Though the project is at a standstill we hope that someday we can use the idea in the future to bring the joy of the Bonsai simulator to people around the world!

Categories Everything else, Prototype