D-Term Game Jam

(Just pretend like I posted that PAX East post when it actually happened and this one wasn't written directly afterwards... >.>)

Anyway, the WPI Game Development Club had their final Game Jam of the year this past weekend and it was AWESOME. 48 hours of pure game making and lots of pizza really makes for a great weekend. Technically it was my first ever game jam and I regret not having participated in one in the past. A bunch of guys from 38 Studios came by and were able to play our games and offer advice. I love having contact with the game industry, rather than just being hidden under the wing of game development academia.

Although I am an exec of the Game Development Club and was staffing the event, I set aside the weekend (school work can wait!) and made it my main focus to make a game. And it was sweet. I worked with Elliot Brodzki and Andrew Tremblay making QWERTY Madness, a platforming game where each letter on the keyboard (well, most of them) gives you a different power or ability once, and you have to use all your powers to be able to use them again. Andrew devised the main idea, Elliot did most of the programming, and I made all the art. We used Adam "Atomic" Saltsman's Actionscript 3 library, flixel, to make the game; I used GraphicsGale to make the in-game art, although I used Photoshop to make the menu screens and backgrounds.

I really like using Flash/flixel for several reasons. For one, it's extremely portable; we made it on Windows Vistas machine in the lab and now it can be played in almost every browser. The flixel library also has a ton of game-specific funtions, so even a sub-par programmer like myself can make a game fairly easily. It is also very conducive to iterative design, of which I am a fan. You can run the game at any time to test it, change a few lines of code, and run it again in a matter of seconds. It satiates my need to fix things and then see the results instantly. I plan to fool around with it when I have some free time, probably after the school year is over. I may even try to make a game with it on the plane ride to/from Japan!

Once again, you can play QWERTY Madness right HERE! Play until your keyboard breaks! (But don't blame us!)