ScatterJam Adventure

Wow, what a crazy and awesome weekend!  We drove to St. Louis Friday night to the opening ceremony of the St. Louis Scatter Jam. It was a great atmosphere and over 130 people signed up for this St. Louis game developer event. It started with live video game music by Fat Bard, then a Keynote by the guys at Butterscotch Shenanigans, and finally the theme was announced.

FENCE and/or SPRING

At first I thought, "what a silly theme"...but it spawned the coolest Idea for a game. Auto-Fencing! We had this grandiose idea, a 3d car game with a twist.  The cars would fence...to the death.  Of course since they were to "fence" they needed some kind of melee weapon, in which they could use to defeat their opponents. My partner Anthony went to work on the 3d models, and I left for Indianapolis to attend my sisters wedding...

Keep in mind, the clock is ticking.

...Anthony questioned me, but no no there is no problem, this is my fourth jam it will be a breeze!  Had I known I would bite those words, they would not have ever left my lips.  My Sister's wedding was absolutely amazing, we had cake, drinks - couldn't have been a better celebration.  About 20 hours into the Jam, Anthony was in St. Louis whipping up as many models as he can, I was about to fall asleep at my sister's wedding reception. The only thing I had contributed to the game at this point was Ideas, and a little pseudo-code.

After the reception I tried to sleep in the car, but with no avail.  I arrived back in the St. Louis area around midnight, 14 hours until the game was due.  I was absolutely exhausted, I hadn't gotten much sleep over the weekend and still no progress on the programming side of things. I went inside, set up my computer, and started hashing out code like it was the end of the world!  Anthony was doubtful, and although I  had my doubts as well, I reassured him that everything would be okay and we would finish the game on time no problem.

At 5:00 am I needed some sleep, I was frustrated that I didn't get sleep earlier in the weekend, but I had to sleep before I became destructive.  I woke up five hours later, grumpy and not in the least bit excited to program. But it's a good thing I slept, because before my nap I had decided to make the game online multi-player...that would have taken up more time than we had. So I wrote up a quick AI code, slapped as many textures on the models as possible uploaded the awesome airport that Anthony built, and submitted the game at 4:20 pm, which was technically 20 minutes late, luckily they accepted our late submission and we made it into the showcase!

You can check out our game Auto-Fencing, at stlscatterjam.com. ---NOTE we are updating the current version, there was a glitch reported today. We WILL have this fixed by tomorrow, check back then thanks!

STL Scatterjam 2014

Defiant Prodigy Games is proud to be a participating team in the St. Louis Scatter Jam this weekend!  This is a big weekend for the team. Not only are we excited to make an awesome gaming experience in just under 48 hours, we are very excited to announce that we have 2 multi-platform games in production!!!... check us out after the jam for more information.

A Bad Trip

Made at the April 2014 STL Game Jam!

Global Game Jam 2014 : St. Louis, MO

From January 24th at 6:00pm to January 26th at 4:00pm, game designers and hobbyists from all around the world came together and made over 4,000 games in under 48 hours! That's A LOT of games!!! I attended in the Global Game Jam at the University of Missouri St. Louis, where around 200 people participated in the global event. Just in St. Louis alone, 28 games were created. Plus, participants were provided t-shirts, snacks, drinks, and even dinner.

I arrived at the UMSL(University of Missouri St. Louis) campus around 3:45pm, and waited in line for almost 20 minutes just to sign in. Each jammer received colored stickers that corrosponded with their role. The stickers I chose were black and blue. Black for design, blue for programming and writing. Sheets were handed out with instructions and "diversifiers". Diversifiers are voluntary constraints to put on the design. Some diversifiers included: Back to the 1885, Can you Come and Play?, Honor Aaron Swartz, Rebels Learn it Better, and Hackontroller. After the 6pm keynote, when the theme "Things are not as they are, they are as you are" was announced, brainstorming groups were created.  

After the brainstorming, groups began to form. I decided, as a personal challenge, to do a project of my own. I chose to make an FPS(First Person Shooter) for the PC and Mac, that can be played in the web browser. The game is called Dark Saga. I learned a lot during the development process, and made quite a few mistakes. I honestly think I spent more time breaking and fixing the game than I did actually designing it! One of the biggest problems I had was with the network programming. It took me about 4 hours to get all the networking issues worked out, so much time wasted!

One of the most valuable lessons I learned during the jam was that i should make full backups of my project before making any big changes, because sometimes unity crashes...and when it does it can really screw up the code. Despite all my struggles, I did complete a working online multiplayer demo of the game. Which can be found at The Global Game Jam website. Enjoy!