#pdjam

[0770man]

#PDJam failure

Due to unforseen circumstances I couldn’t finish my entry to PDJam. I wanted to do something like Barbarian but based on the Three Musketeers.

[chrishopper]

Everybody else is graduating this weekend and I'm just over here planning a game jam.

[cherubim-scribes]

Here's the link to our Public Domain Jam entry. It's still an early version Haze tells me (music and sound missing, text the old one, etc.) but, I hope you still give it a try :) We're working on version 1.0 in the meantime.

[kidikd]

What I Play, Every Day - 5/24/14

Two days off! Partly because I've been beset by illness, but also because I was making a game for the Public Domain Game Jam! Check out my game, 2BR02B, here. There are some hoops to jump through, thanks to me not shelling out for any paid versions of Game Maker, but I'm grateful to anyone who gives it a shot.

This was my first game, and I'm reasonably proud of the outcome. I had just about a week of practice with Game Maker beforehand, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy and flexible the program was. That said, I still managed to stick my game with a nice bug that I wasn't able to figure out. Plus, it's a generally boring game. I really should've spent more time with my design before just jumping in. It ended up being much easier to make things look and sound pretty than to actually make the game fun.

I have another design that I'm already looking forward to making in Game Maker, and even the worst possible version of that will be more fun than this game. So get ready, world!

[cherubim-scribes]

Finally finished this chicks (un-colored) sprite set~ That and the GUI (showing the hover version/NVL/Textbox here)!

Hope we can finish this jam in time >>"

[kristinsson]

First panel for my Public Domain Jam entry is done!! Now to do all the others.. :-/

[vividxp]

PDJam: I'm not doing it, but something might show up anyways...

What is the PDJam? It's the nickname (and hashtag) for the Public Domain Jam, which is promoting the use of stories, characters, settings, etc., from stories in the public domain in games. Their example of such a character is the zombie, which is definitely one of the most popular of such entities. 

The Jam lasts for a week, starting yesterday (Saturday, the 17th) and ends on Saturday, the 24th. The top 100 games get a resource bundle. The top game gets the resource bundle and $1000. The theme of the Jam is "Paper".

Also in a decision that is sure to be controversial, they decided that you could not use free/public-domain assets in your game; Assets would have to be made by you. The justification is that this gets around the bias that people have against those assets. As some one experienced with the RPG Maker community, I understand (but it's funny how most, popular and finished games use the free RTP, but let's not go down that path).

Under the cut contains ramblings of how I spent a long time determining if the story I wanted to use could be considered public domain.

So I couldn't resist from putting on my "Well, Actually..."!hat to point out that despite zombies being 'overdone', what we consider zombies are a considerable departure the original, Haitian zombies.

But, if I do PDJam (and I'm not sure yet, I'm taking summer classes and job hunting, I might not have time), I wasn't going to press my luck on the zombie issue. Although a game about a Haitian slave running away with the aids of Astral and Physical zombies is a pretty interesting one, note to self.

So, after returning from some Graduate Development seminars (I learned a lot, I plan on finishing a lot of research and writing this summer too!), I took a look through all the fairytale and folklore books I own. I love fairytale and folklore, and the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore library is a good survey of world folklore; I own several Pantheon books. 

I found the story that, if I was doing PDJam (and I'm not sure yet), would be the game, but it's not a Cinderella, or a Momotaro, or Aladdin so there was a chance that this was the only version of fairytale easily available, and the book itself was definitely not public domain.

So if I was going to do PDJam (and, you know the rest), I would need to find another version that's in the public domain. Thankfully, the source that the editor used was not a recitation of the story some old man in Yobe state, but a book in German that was published almost 100 years ago. German copyright law states that copyright ends 70 years after the author's death. So thankfully, the author died long enough ago (morbid!).

Also I was able to find an open access download of the entire book. I plan on typing the whole thing into google translate and running with it.

But of course, that's if I end up doing the PDJam, I'm not sure about that yet.