Jamming

The auction for the primary/exclusive license of Defend Your Nuts 2 will begin in the near future! In the meantime I have been doing a lot of prototyping with my new "game jam" Flash project that contains all the bare minimum systems, and utility functions that can be sprinkled here and there.

Here are some of the prototypes that I came up with...

Stage Crew

In Stage Crew you manage the sound effects and spotlights of a live play. The audience can react depending on your timing and accuracy! For example, randomly playing a gunshot sound effect will confuse the audience and reduces their reviews of the show.

I have moderate experiences working on sound and light back in high-school for plays. The real thrill was manipulating what hundreds of people were looking at, so of course it is hard to capture in a virtual setting.

Epic Gymnastics

At first I wanted to control a ragdoll-physics character on a balance beam, but it was too difficult to get him to balance and do tricks of any kind. Normally games simplify something from the real world. Here I took something that already is hard for the average person, and made it impossible!

The high-bar showed a bit more promise, because the hands are attached which removes the need to maintain any kind of balance. I played around with a lot of different controls that manipulate torque or applied force on different parts of the body. The keyboard as a primary controller does not suffice, so fake analog sticks on an iPad would have been better.

Unnamed Robot Prototype

I did not go too far with this one. It involved building a robot with different materials, including green and blue circles that rotate with the arrow keys. The gray circle represents a circular saw.

Back to the drawing board...

On a related note, I have decided to participate in Global Game Jam 2013 at NYU, located in Manhattan!

The closest site from me would be Baltimore, but that would be too much commuting for three days back to back. Actually I visit NYC many times a year, so this time I am making an "extended vacation" out of it by getting a nearby hotel room. Depending on how it goes, I may participate every year in a different city. I live way out in farm country, in a small town in Pennsylvania so it is easy to get restless at times.