#ggj12

[lonelyorchidman]

GGJ entry transferred from my old school blog.

How cool is it that our country has 2 sites this year? The two lovely sites were UP ITTC & DLSU CSB. I signed up for UP ITTC of course, since I love that location, but there were more participants from CSB. Mostly I think they were CSB students.

It's actually quite impressive how well-equipped both these sites are. Well, CSB didn't have available PC units, but it still had adequate space and rooms etc. Also, they hosted the awarding and it was very organized this year compared to last year.

Hmm, I honestly don't know where to begin. This was my first time participating as a Jammer and I am probably one of the least qualified people in this event, but the best part is that didn't even matter. I still had loads of fun!

I arrived on-site alone and then promptly formed a team with 3 brilliant dudes. I recognized one of them from last year's Jam, but that was it. I didn't know who they were but we got along like a big house on fire and it was great. I even attempted to make a game of my own since I was so eager (being a noob and all), but my idea was rather boring so I dropped it and focused on our group effort.

My team rocket-launched my massive inspiration to learn programming languages already. They were all so proficient in what they were doing that I wanted to be like that too. LOL.

I am definitely going to join MGGJ 2013. Seriously, are the GGJs even real?! I mean, hell--- you don't pay for any registration or anything; you get access to technological facilities, wi-fi and space; ; you get cool freebies like shirts and bags; you get free meals (the food was delicious this year!); you meet all kinds of amazing people with the same interests AND you make games with them.

It's like being paid to have fun for a smashing weekend. Do you believe this shit? Because I still can't. Haha. :)

BTW, this year's top 2 winners are ENCLOSURE : THE INFINITE HUES by Team December Project & CURSED STEPS by Roan Contreras! Check 'em out because they kick ass. 

I still haven't gotten around to playing all the MGGJ games. I'm excited to try 'em all out, including the foreign ones. Will likely do more GGJ-related posts in the future too. :d

[itayke]

Mushroom 11 - Early Prototype Gameplay

Check out this preliminary gameplay clip. Some early background sketches and ground formations have made it into this build.

[itayke]

Mushroom 11 - Dynamic Flood Fill

Mushroom 11 consists of some CPU intensive calculations that significantly drag down performance on mobile devices. One of the the most intensive parts is determining which organism cells should be detached to make a separate instance, while the organism is going through constant change of growth and destruction.

Here's a demo of my new Dynamic Flood Fill algorithm, slowed down and visualized. See full explanation below.

The original approach was to make a complete Flood Fill every few frames after player has destroyed parts of the organism. Even when an optimized approach was used  (horizontal loop, vertical recurse), it still yielded some noticeable FPS drops on mobile devices.

The above demo uses a dynamic version of the flood fill, which differ from the original in two major aspects - it triggers the flood fill in a few separate locations (and not necessarily in sync), and it rate-limits the flood fill speed.

Since each location starts a new flood-fill group and the spread is limited to a certain cells-per-frame speed, smaller areas finish faster and get detached immediately. This works perfectly for Mushroom 11 when the smaller batches need to separate fast or it will look like it's hanging in mid-air.

Another advantage of DFF is that since all groups are autonomous, if one batch get detached, the other batches continue normally. This means that many detachments can happen simultaneously in different parts of the organism. 

The result of this new algorithm (tested on my iPad1) is instead of 50fps with spikes of down to 20fps, the game runs smoothly on 45-50fps. Here is a basic overview of the algorithm.

Dynamic Flood Fill

When a cell is destroyed, all its cell neighbors (cell-up, cell-left, etc) are triggered as flood-fill origins.

Every origin starts a completely separate fill-group and holds a list of all previously filled cells, and a list (stack) of future cells to fill. It also holds the fill-group neighbors (see below).

Flood-Fill step: Every frame runs a loop of flood-fill steps per each of the fill-groups, in each of the different organisms. A flood-fill step takes one cell from future-list, fills it (and updates filled-list), and adds all its empty cell-neighbors to future-list for the next iteration.

Grouping: If a fill-step leads a cell to a member of another fill-group (touching groups), then: a. if the other fill-group is empty, delete it and continue normally. b. if the other fill-group is not empty, mark the two fill-groups as neighbors.

Detach: If a future-list is exhausted (flood-fill complete for that fill-group), check all if all neighbors are finished (recursively, we need all connected groups). If yes, we have a complete list (or lists) of all painted cells. If that list is smaller than the total number of cells in this organism, then detach these cells to form a new organism instance.

Destroy: if a cell is destroyed, we check if it's already filled. If not, then we don't care, since the fill will never hit it anyway. If it is already filled, we need to invalidate the entire fill-group and all its neighbor fill-groups. And then trigger the cell-neighbors as completely new flood-fill origins.

Growth: when a new cell grows on the organism, we check if it is a neighbor of any fill-group. If so, that cell is placed in the future cells list of that group. Otherwise, the fill algorithm will catch up to it later.

That's it, more or less. Hope this has been helpful or at least interesting! Let me know if you have any questions, suggestions or improvements.

Check back soon for more updates. Thanks, -- Itay 

[lonelyorchidman]

Best bud is finishing up their game for their finals this month, I'll probably share it after. In the meantime, we've done our last updates on Stasis; our sick game from the GGJ12. Literally, it's SICK since it’s about bacteria and cells and how you have to regulate the breeding of bacteria in the internal organs and stuff LOL. Not that it’s obvious, since I did a stellar job with the graphics. *barf* BUT HEY WHO CARES about the crappy graphics! The game is fun! XD Took me the day after the Jam to understand how to play it LOL. 

I’ll put my Global Game Jam-related musings under the Read More cut since it is long and it’s about time I wrote about this.

Our team was special since we were the only one formed by people who were previously completely strangers! All the other teams were groups of people who were friends or who came to the Jam site together. Us however? We all had never met each other before the event and decided to team up on the first night.

Now that I think about it, I was pretty darn shameless in my first GGJ. I was a marshall in 2011’s Jam and I observed how things went down. It’s completely different when you’re a part of it though. This year, I had no friends with me, so when I saw these 2 cute fellows  (lol they’d feel creeped out if they knew I was calling them cute behind their backs) who looked like they belonged in my age group, I asked them to sit at my table cause I was alone and I didn’t want to look pathetically alone throughout dinner okay! They were kind enough to say yes aww.

They were ace programmers oh my god from THE most high-class university in this country. I actually didn’t know that until like, after the Jam.  Actually these two cool dudes aren’t just programmers, they were artists too and so that makes them all-around game designers.

During brainstorming, we were shuffled into different groups and that’s where I met our soon-to-be team leader. His forte is programming with a specialty in Unity 3D. He hailed from the 2nd most high-class university this time. Later on, we were fortunate enough to all agree to be teammates. Awh yeah team of four! 

I felt really awkward at some point. It was my first Jam, I was an artist and not even that great of a game artist either. I can only do 2d art in Flash. One of the organizers whom I had met the year prior mistook me for a pixel artist. Damn. (No that’s not the reason I am studying how to do pixel art right now, what are you saying? Haha) I can code AS2 & AS3 in Flash and a wee bit of Python in Ren’Py (lol) and that’s about it. Also I basically came from a really unknown college (not even a graduate yet) but the tuition is cheap so whatever dude. This is what I can afford! *sobs* 

The theme is OUROBOROS. Haha I should have just done a game with Albert Wesker and Excella or something RE5-related. Anyway, it’s a freaking difficult theme!!! Last year it was just “extinction”. That’s super easy compared to the complexity of ouroboros.

Anyway, despite a lot of booboos on my part, (Like trying to do a solo game WHILE doing graphics for our team game! Really self! What the hell?) I enjoyed the fuck out of my first Jam ever. My only regret? I was too shy to take a lot of photos of my team! Also I didn’t do a video log! Next time I join I’m definitely going to do a video log. Also I didn’t befriend everyone! My main goal in GGJs is to make friends and learn , not make the most kickass game. Which is why I am very happy that my team were made up of a bunch of goofy geniuses who weren‘t concerned with winning. Fell in love with them and though we don't talk now, (except for team leader who last contacted me about editing assets), I still love 'em.

Not sure if I’m going to join GGJ 2013... I’m extremely tempted, but I would like to at least be a considerably decent pixel artist by then. Hmmm but well, free food, free internet, free lodging, new friends, learning new stuff that possibly can’t be learned as pleasantly in any other environment, free shirts, free mugs and bags and this really cute ID… THE REASONS TO JOIN ARE OVERWHELMING.

Someday, I'm going to look back on all the GGJ games I was a part of, then I shall cry.

[staffsgamesacademy]

Towers talking about Games Jam and the game they made - Eternal Return

[reblogstronomical]

Wow. This game looks absolutely beautiful and I wish I weren't at work right now so that I could play it. It's available for both Mac and PC.

Mirrormoon via goodgameget

[lonelyorchidman]

Tumblr is so distracting.

I have work Tumblr. I have lots of things to do. Why must you have so many interesting things all the time?! I can sit here and reblog shit all fucking day.

Anyway... I didn't get to liveblog the GGJ. Turns out I was too busy trying to be a productive noob game artist lol. I totally sucked but IT WAS SO MUCH FUN.

Maybe I'll post photos here soon. Because I can. And because this blog is like a big random blob of everything. I'll be posting my "art" here soon too. (You didn't see it, but the word 'art' came with air-quotes ala-Castiel.) I do this thing where I exercise my fingers by drawing at least one thing everyday. I have to be even just partially satisfied with whatever it is too so unfortunately I can't post stick people. (Awww.)

So 2012 is Code Year right? So yeah, I'm going to study Java, C# & more AS3. I'm not going to take up 3D ATM since the available facilities are not optimal for such hardware-intensive activities. I'll get to that when I get an upgrade when I get to save enough moohlah.

There's a tumblr for our GGJ 2012 entry. I'll post it here once I add more content. Might reblog GGJ related things too later.

[hunnypeas]

Just in case you missed the link to the game I helped make in 48hrs, heeere it is: http://globalgamejam.org/2012/pyramid-defense 

It was even featured by http://www.athinkingape.com/ for it's awesomeness! Please excuse all the bugs and lack of explanations, we were all pretty darn tired by the end of it :I 

Edit: The game .exe file is in the folder "release", by the way, haha.