It still hssn't really hit me that school ended on Friday, maybe because I never actually left he school until 11PM last night.
Right after my last exam on friday, at 3PM, right in the same room, in the same building, I moved about 2 seats over and started working against the clock to create a game by Sunday at 8pm for the annual
TOJam.
Our goal: Show our teachers that we can make a game which is better than the one we spent an entire semester working on(it's still not finished, btw) and only have 5 people workin on it, rather than ~100.
We had 5 people on our team: 2 programmers(including myself), and 3 artists, sounds were created by a guy floating around(floater) who was helping everyone.
Story:
After we finished our exams, we went out to grab some food for a few minutes before coming back to get started on the game as there were still people in the class finishing their exams. At around 4 o'clock we sat back down at the same desks and began the game we'd been planning for about a week.
Because we have a few smokers on our team, we ended up going out every hour or so for a smoke, and a small break. Seemed harmless enough, we were expecting to finish everything on time, as we thought our game was small.
We all spent the first night awake, just craming in the assets for the game. Our character artist/animator finished the character & its animation cycles pretty early that night actually, and they were some pretty amazing animations i must say. Other small assets were also completed by our prop artist, but we also kep coming up with more things to be completed. The Level Designer spent a long time working on the level. The game is 2D, but the map is
MASSIVE in comparison to the size of the player. The map is exactly 3,200 pixels wide, and 48,000 pixels in height, and while it is grayscale, the artist had to add different layers(background, mid ground, foreground etc) so it took a while to get that all done. Actually, the final version of the level was handed to the programmers within the last 2 hours of development.
During that first night, one of our teachers, who was also participating in the event, had already finished the programming for his team, so he had floated his way to help us out with our programming. I'm still fairly new at programming, so a lot of what was being done was way out of my knowledge range, which is why i let the lead programmer deal with the code features of the game, while I tackled some of the events which occured during the game and other things which I could actually pogram.
We were the only people in our room(out of other 20(?) people) who had actually styed the night, so we had the entire room to ourselves. We decidied to turn of the lights so tthat we would all feel like we're at home. Just darkness and the light from the monitors. We were pretty energized on the first night, at least until around 5am when things started to get a little crazy. We went to take a 'break', but really we just ended up lying on the floor near the door talking about what it would be like to play a game where your character is a floor(patent pending), and other random shit while we had
The Final Countdown playing on one of our computers. People were walking by the doors and giving us funny looks.
After a while of talking out of our ass, the teacher that was helping us showed up and we headed out to see if we'd get some breakfast. We walked about a block away into a 24-hour grocery store, looked at a bunch of food, but nobody ended up buying anything. We then headed back to the school and started wondering whether Tim Hortons was open that early in the morning, spent about 10 minutes arguing that with eachother, then we split up with 2 people going there and the rest of us went in and got back to work.
At around 11am one of the companies sponsoring the event(
Get Set Games who also competed) brought in a bunch of bagels for us to breakfast on, so that solved our issues of breakfast, it just took a bit longer than we had hoped.
After about 1pm that day, 2 of our artists went home to shower and catch up on some sleep for a few hours, and came back around 7 o'clock after we spent hours trying to call them because they said they'd be back earlier. The rest of us stayed there working. Our prop artist stayed behind and worked on some more props for the animator to animate when(if) he returned. After racking up lots of calls on their phones, they finally picked up to let us know they were on their way. One of them arrived pretty fast, the Level Designer took another hour or so to show up because he lives farther, so the prop artist ended up going home for the night because he was taking a while to show up.
That night, after working for a while, our teacher took us out to a bar about a block away and bought us some drinks. We didn't drink much since we were all running on fumes, and we didn't want to pass out the night since we still had a lot to do. We did slow down a bit though. After getting back, we tried to get a couple of hours of sleep. One of the guys managed to do so, I just couldn't comfortably fall a sleep though, so that was short-lived.
The next morning during one of our "breaks" we went to Tim Hortons to get a quick breakfast, then after that it was just crunch time. We were hoping that we'd finish the game pretty early so we have some breathing time, but it was a tad different that than. We spent the entire day just finishing the game. Time basically flew by as we crammed as much stuff into the game as we could to get it working before deadline. Art-wise, all we had to do the last day was fix some animations, finish the level and create the menu system/GUI. Code-wise, we had to fix lots of bugs with collision, movement and place the rest of the assets into the game.
The last hour of the competition was spent doing QA. It was the first time we actually were able to play through the entire game. Bugs were being reported left and right as we tried to fix the major gameplay ones before the deadline. We ended up removing some obstacles for now because we didn't have time to fix the problems they were causing.
The final version of the game was compiled while they did the 10 second countdown, it was a very close call.
After the deadline was reached, everybody stopped and went outside for some celebratory pizza and a raffle, then it was time to play the completed games. I managed to play about one or two games before I headed home to catch a shower and some sleep which I hadn't had all weekend.
All in all, it was an awesome experience and challenge. Chances are, we might be doing this again next year, but hopefully we'll make a smaller game haha.
PS: EP Daily will be doing a segment on the event, one of the reporters was there last night before the deadline, so be sure to keep an eye on that.
PPS: We have until friday to hand in the finalized version of the game, which is what we will be doing. Once it's done, I'll post it in my profile.
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