SXSW Game Jam 2013
Early on, a few weeks before the actual event, my friend Jim, who I had met at the last Global Game Jam, asked if we could be on teams. I'd tell him yes, but didn't plan on forming a team ahead of time.
But then I attended Game On, an event at UT Austin, where I got a chance to talk to some people from the industry in a relatively casual setting, meet up with old friends, and listen to Katie Salen give an interesting talk about how game design was changing how we teach. After the event, I ended up partnering with Aaron, who had won the previous Global Game Jam, and found out that we were apparently impatient.
We ended up talking about ideas for the SXSW Game Jam, although it wasn't set to start until the next day. One idea was a two player game based around throwing the other player, whether it be for malicious or cooperative intent. Another was about two people that have to help each other, but couldn't see each other. These ideas weren't that great though; I also wanted to make a game that was more arcade-like with quick feedback and action-oriented gameplay.
The next day we kept brainstorming as we got to the SXSW Interactive site early (so we could see the event we'd be missing out on while participating in the jam and attend the job fair), and there was one particular idea we latched onto while brainstorming. I suggested a game where you played as a character that couldn't control when to fire; instead, the rocket launcher fired periodically on it's own and all you could do was move around and aim. We found this, coupled with the fact that you can kill yourself from the rocket's explosion, hilarious. We added reflective walls, cooperative play (with friendly fire on, of course), and more... and then 5:00 rolled around and we needed to find out what the theme was.
I was kind of worried that the theme wouldn't be related at all to our idea, but, as it turns out, the theme that Bryon, the event organizer, was touting as the best theme ever was... launch. We were surprised it had worked out so well. It was kind of a perfect theme.
There was, unfortunately, no place at SXSW where we could just hunker down and work on the game along with all of the other participants, so we and 2 other teams from EGaDS headed down to the new GDC building on campus, acquired a room, and started working.
I had a cool Kixeye branded mouse pad that I picked up earlier at SXSW Interactive, which turned out to be pretty useful. I also had a bunch of Xbox 360 controllers laying around, which was awesome because I usually don't use controllers. Controllers are a lot of fun to play with.
Jim arrived later that night, taking us out on a grocery run at a nearby HEB for food where I bought a whole chicken, among other things, that I ate for the next few days.
Everything afterwards went pretty smooth; we all worked pretty well together and we got stuff done. It was also exciting to see other teams working on really cool ideas – a mecha robot QWOP game and a top down space shooter in which light played a huge role in its game mechanics. Unfortunately, the mecha robot QWOP game didn't finish, but it was awesome and interesting to see how fast they were raking up assets. They had people doing animation cutscenes and even voice acting for the game. Needless to say, they were able to do this due to their large group size.
The presentation for the games got moved around due to some scheduling errors, so we ended up presenting the game at around 6:30 instead of 7:00. In addition, due to the now low amount of time for the presentation, a few of the judges played the games instead of letting the teams show them off. Thankfully, the judges had pretty ample time to check out the games and figure them out beforehand, but I still wish they let us present them so that we could show them something in the game that they might have missed or let us quickly share our experience of making the game.
Of the four teams that ended up winning at the SXSW Interactive Game Jam, two of them were comprised of mostly members from EGaDS. We won for "Most Fun Game" and the other EGaDS team won for "Best Use of Light". We all won free Unity Pro licenses and our team was actually randomly selected to get a Guild Wars 2 collector's edition box, which we gave to Jim.
If you want to check out the game we made, Crunch Rockets, you can read more about it here.