Global Game Jam January 2017

Global Game Jam is an annual event held at approximately 700 sites simultaneously across the world in which participants join teams to create a video game in 48 hours. I participated in the event for the first time this year in January at the North Sydney Institute of TAFE's site and had a blast! This year's theme was "Waves" and joining in an enthusiastic team with three other people I met at the event, we created our game "Jet Ski Jousting".

I was a little apprehensive when I turned up to the event on a Friday afternoon, not knowing anyone, and not being sure if I'd even be able to join a team. Luckily I ran into a pair who had done the event for at least the last three years and needed some audio. Overall there were about 60-70 people there (I guess) and everyone was super friendly and inclusive. There were a range of different games types and platforms, people doing standard PC games, tablet games, VR etc.

I did the sound and music for the game (and a little bit of UI art) which was a great experience, as I've mostly been involved in programming or game design in previous projects. I used Musescore to compose the background theme and a little victory jingle, and used Audacity to chop and post-process a range of open-licenced sounds I found online, mostly through Freesound.org for sound effects. I combined these all together and integrated them into our game (which was built in Unity) using FMod, which I had never used before; it was relatively easy to pick-up with a few pointers from one of our other team members who knew what he was doing.

Jet Ski Jousting runs on Android and PC/OSX (source distribution requires Unity) and can be downloaded here: Jet Ski Jousting (Global Game Jam 2017)

I had a bit of spare time on one of the mornings so I also worked on a little side-project game. I had brought along my Wii Balance Board that I picked up from an Op Shop a few weeks ago, and a Raspberry Pi 3. I previously got the Wii Balance Board to talk to the RPi over Bluetooth using python, so I worked off this to build a game in python/pygame called "waverider". It's a sort of motion-racing game where you have to accelerate a particle along a wave function by leaning left and right to steer the particle up or down the hills in the wave function, racing another particle to get to the end of the course.

Good thing about using the RPi was that I could plug it into a ceiling mounted TV hanging above a busy thoroughfare and leave the balance board on the ground nearby, so passerbys could casually play. People seemed to enjoy the game; a bit of physical movement was probably a nice respite from intense work in front of a computer screen.


The code for the game is available here: Waverider (Global Game Jam 2017)