This morning was rather rough, there was little sleeping space and many more people stayed the night. No doubt we were all burning that midnight oil trying to wrap up games and eliminate bugs. After 8am just about everyone was up and awake, albeit very groggy and still tired. Scuba, Shaun, and I got right back to work. Meanwhile Dan and Steve were able to get some extra shuteye and recover a bit. We spent the morning troubleshooting and looking for a dirty nasty bug in our network functionality.

Our game is a two player RTS. One player acts as the host and the other connects as a client. This is all working fine and well, but our issue is with controlling cameras and passing states over the network. Debugging and QA is always on our mind during game jam development and we had already scaled our concept back to what we thought would be a manageable scope. Sadly, the troubleshooting phase has been much more of a beast than we had anticipated. A big lesson was learned this weekend, networking is a pain in the @$$.

This is one of those game jam games that is just too much game for one weekend. Although it is jam packed with animations, awesome art, glorious sounds, and hard code our game just won't be ready for prime time today. Our team has worked pretty hard this weekend, and I'm proud of the product that we've come up with. We will keep messing with the code until turn-in, but it's going to be tight.

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Our team is dropping like flies, of course I was the first one to go down at 2am and take a power nap. It felt pretty good to get a couple of hours of rest. The downside is that everyone else is now passing out and I feel like a zombie in a video game development wasteland; the time is 4:45am.

Our game has come such a long way since Saturday afternoon, but I fear that once again our excitement has gotten the better of us. The game itself looks pretty good and quite a bit of the RTS functionality is in. Unfortunately we may run out of time to get all the code and animations working properly in the game. I'm rather confident that we will finish our game, but perhaps it won't be fully complete by the turn in deadline.

Ambitious is the only way to describe our efforts, making a game in 48hrs is nuts and making one with networked play is insane. We've haven't attempted to develop a 2 player game in such a tight turn-around schedule before. It is kicking our asses! Dan and Scuba have been coding their eyes out, but this is just too much for two programmers. Like I said before, the game looks and sounds great! Now we just need to get our win/lose condition working across the network and we may yet finish. We are so close...

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Half of our team went home early this morning around 4am. "Scuba" Steve Emmerich and I hung out and stayed up for a while longer. Eventually I ended up crashing and left Scuba Steve as the last man standing. Scuba worked Unity3D into submission and made it his well mannered four legged friend. Progress for sure, he worked out some major bugs in the Point and Click system by defining unit formation and movement. Scuba finally went to bed around 8:30 am and is now sleeping like a conqueror.

The rest of the fellas headed out to find nicer places to sleep and rest. Even Shaun our audio man seems to have worked extra hours, he compiled a list of audio samples and is coming back in later today with mad equipment; we lucked out meeting him.

Steve Chao and Romel Revollo rocked it with their models and animated rigs. I have this weird feeling that Romel is going to surprise us today with some sweet textures, I hope he got some sleep. Dan will have his plate full with hammering out the networking components and testing client/host communication and feasibility. He is also doing a coffee run and will return shortly.

In the meantime I've been chatting with fellow game jammers here at GMU, they are some of the coolest most laid back people. Everyone is in high spirits and surprisingly energized for having so little sleep. I'm also nearly finished with our game documentation and will be focusing on UI elements and some level design modeling in 3dsmax.

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It is nearly time to lay down and pass out for a few hours. Our team has kicked some major ass and completed a good part of our first day milestones. We have two fully modeled characters, early unwraps, two rigs, and one of them made it into our game engine. The art is coming along and so is the scripting. We have networked play working, to a degree. We're not sure how we're going to handle playing over multiple networks; it may not be possible without a dedicated server. However, you can play as long as you're on the same network. Meanwhile the drag/select functionality is getting better and improving steadily.

I'm going to go lay on this futon and dream about making a better terrain for our level. Saturday will be a packed day for sure and we'll need to get some rest. Peace out for now.

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We are in effect and are on our way. The team has come together and collaborated on a RTS concept that not only includes the dark menacing theme of "Extinction", but puts a fun twist on it. We are nearing our next turbo/progress meeting and we'll have more to report later. However, we are working on testing networked play functionality while our artists create a style for our characters. This year for the first time we have a team that includes an audio guru who will add the professional polish that all games need.

More later. So exciting this is!

Global Game Jam

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Labels: game design