gamedevos

[gamedevos]

Hallo ich muss ein zweiwöchiges Schulpraktikum machen. Ich würde gerne wissen was genau ihr macht und ob ich dieses Praktikum auch bei euch machen kann. Falls ja, wann kann oder soll ich mich für ein Bewerbungsgespräch bei euch melden. MfG Paul

Lieber Paul,

Ich gehe mal davon aus, dass Du ein Schüler in der 9. oder 10. Klasse aus dem Osnabrücker Land bist, der sich für Spiele-Entwicklung, Programmierung, 3D-Modellierung oder Modding interessiert.

Was wir machen: GameDevOS ist eine lockere Gruppierung von Spiel-Entwicklern aus Osnabrück, die sich regelmäßig treffen und ab und zu gemeinsam an Game Jams teilnehmen. GameDevOS ist keine Firma und hat keine Angestellten. Bei uns kann man deswegen keine Praktika machen.

Einige von uns arbeiten hauptberuflich im Bereich Virtual Reality oder in der App-Entwicklung oder in Spiele-Firmen. Vielleicht gibt es bei @fantasieleben oder @fastodyssey im Betrieb eine Möglichkeit, ein Praktikum zu machen. Falls ja, werden die das dann hier posten, bis dahin mache ich hier lieber keine Schleichwerbung für Arbeitgeber.

[gamedevos]

Ludum Dare 37 Game Jam Osnabrück

We will start jamming Saturday, 10th of December, somewhat after 10 am, and we can jam until Sunday late at night. The location is Innovationscentrum Osnabrück, Albert-Einstein-Str. 1, room TBD. The front door is locked, so once you are on site please get in touch with Erik or Tilman to get in. Everybody is welcome, whether you are just curious about making games or have years of experience. If you don’t know any of us please RSVP to tilman@fantasieleben.com - we will then give you our mobile numbers so you can get in any time even if nobody is waiting at the front door. You can also direct any questions you have to this e-mail address ;). Furthermore you can use this document to let us know what skils you have and what you want to work on: https://goo.gl/forms/yYzt62GZmdBsqJAi2

[gamedevos]

Moin Moin, ich werde in 2 Monaten nach Osnabrueck ziehen und teste derzeit viel in PhaserJS und mit PixelArt herum. Habe gesehen das seit 2015 keine Treffen mehr eingetragen sind, existiert ihr noch :)?

Ja, wir sind als Gruppe in fb zu finden mit aktuellen Terminen, such einfach auf fb gamedevos oder Spieleentwickler Osnabrück.

[gamedevos]

Ludum Dare 36 in Osnabrück

We will start jamming Saturday, 27th of August, somewhat after 10 am, and we can jam until Sunday late at night. The location is Innovationscentrum Osnabrück, Albert-Einstein-Str. 1, room Hawking. The front door is locked, so once you are on site please get in touch with Erik or Tilman to get in. Everybody is welcome, whether you are just curious about making games or have years of experience. If you don’t know any of us please RSVP to tilman@fantasieleben.com - we will then give you our mobile numbers so you can get in any time even if nobody is waiting at the front door. You can also direct any questions you have to this e-mail address ;).

[gamedevos]

LUDUM DARE 35 @ ICO

We will start jamming Saturday, 16th of April, somewhat after 10 am, and we can jam until Sunday late at night. The location is Innovationscentrum Osnabrück, Albert-Einstein-Str. 1, room Newton. The front door is locked, so once you are on site please get in touch with Erik, Fabian or Tilman to get in. Everybody is welcome, whether you are just curious about making games or have years of experience. If you don’t know any of us please RSVP to tilman@fantasieleben.com - we will then give you our mobile numbers so you can get in any time even if nobody is waiting at the front door. You can also direct any questions you have to this e-mail address ;).

The room is sponsored by FANTASIELEBEN, the company that is providing NEEDSIM Life simulation.

[gamedevos]

Wyst

“Wyst” by @OhHelloTilman, @gnihad, @blubberquark, @fastodyssey, Jonas Görlich, Fabian Schlarmann​ & Sven Wilke.

“[A]n exploratory adventure set on a little island. Wander around, discover the parts of the Island, discover the secret workings of Wyst and solve the Mysteries.”

Up for some classy and classic adventure-puzzle-fun? Here you go! “Wyst” has a soft retro touch and revives quite successfully the charm of the “Myst”-series. Good job! >>PLAY

[gamedevos]

Wyst is a tricky low poly first person puzzler set on a mysterious floating island in which you must grow a magical tree high enough to help you escape. A short, fun and stylish low poly adventure.

Play The Full Game, Free (Windows & Mac)

[gamedevos]

And here some pictures of our second day! It was a relatively relaxed crunch-time and we can say we have a game ready! 😊 And we have a whole day left!! But the finishing work has to be done via remote work. We are excited, what we can bring to finish. 😳

[gamedevos]

Some impressions of the first day & night of ludumdare at the Innovationscentrum Osnabrück! 😎 Nice people, nice location, nice food and nice ideas! Now we just have to finish the game!! 😬

[gamedevos]

LD34 game jam in Osnabrück

We met today, and the specifics are now clear. We will start jamming Saturday, 12th of December, at 10 am, and we can jam until Sunday late at night. The location is Innovationscentrum Osnabrück, Albert-Einstein-Str. 1, room Hawking. The front door is locked, so once you are on site please get in touch with Erik or Tilman to get in. Everybody is welcome, whether you are just curious about making games or have years of experience. If you don’t know any of us please RSVP to tilman@fantasieleben.com - we will then give you our mobile numbers so you can get in any time even if nobody is waiting at the front door. You can also direct any questions you have to this e-mail address ;).

The room is sponsored by FANTASIELEBEN, the company that is providing NEEDSIM Life simulation.

[gamedevos]

Post-mortem TETROMINIONS

First things first: LUDUM DARE 34 is coming up!

With LUDUM DARE 34 just around the corner, and a cozy room in the Innovationscentrum Osnabrück (Albert-Einstein-Str. 1, 49076 Osnabrück) reserved for the jam on the 12th and 13th of December 2015, it is time for a reflection on TETROMINIONS, one of the entries made in Osnabrück for LUDUM DARE 32 in April.

What is a Tetrominion?

The original article was written a while ago, April 2015, as a reflection on the first beta version of the NEEDSIM Life simulation, the tool my company FANTASIELEBEN is working on, but I’ll try to keep the following a bit more general. At every game jam it is my goal to try something a bit crazy and off the beaten tracks that could end up with new insights into game design, and I don’t care too much whether it will end up a failure. Additionally, at LUDUM DARE 32 a specific goal of mine was to test the NEEDSIM Life simulation in action.

The theme was “An unconventional weapon”. Themes that more or less force you to work with the ‘kill’ verb in your game design usually don’t make me enthusiastic, as killing stuff has been explored abundantly in game design and can be solved with almost no creativity. But in this case we managed to come up with an unconventional enough way on how and what to kill that I got excited. We agreed on the idea to use tetrominos as weapons to kill minions, now called… tetrominions! A good name means chances are good that an executable concept is on its way, and in fact I think the prototype we came up with during the jam is promising.

We used the first beta version of the NEEDSIM Life simulation to very quickly set up a simulation.NEEDSIM Life simulation allows game developers to define needs for characters and then give objects interactions that allow the characters to satisfy their needs.Tetrominions’ most urgent need is to build tetrominos, thereby changing the playing field continuously. Hard work is tireding, so to make tetrominions look more life-like we made it so that at times tetrominions want to sleep. This need is less urgent that the need to build blocks. Personally I think it is quite a cute spin on the classic tetris game. However, since the jam is about killing, you can kill tetrominions in their sleep!

Getting NEEDSIM Life simulation up and running

As Tetrominions is a 2D game using the x and y axis, and has a very dynamic level, the Unity NavMesh was not an option. We decided to use a free A* tool from the Unity Asset Store. To reuse the NEEDSIM Life simulation code samples conveniently we implemented a new TetrisNavAgent class that manages the details of movement on the third party nav mesh, and thus in NEEDSIM Life simulation only had to change the type of our NavMeshAgent to TetrisNavAgent. Unfortunately there was no time to properly implement how the nav-mesh is re-calculated when a new tetromino/stone is landing, and thus characters make a weird jump when that happens. Furthermore, as the nav mesh was meant for top-down, we had to cheat by adding invisible colliders somewhat above the surface, otherwise tetrominions would fly as in the screenshot above.

To animate the tetrominions we created a MECANIM state machine. By naming the transitions in the same way as the interactions are named in NEEDSIM Life simulation we have a simple way to control the Mecanim state machine with the NEEDSIM Life Simulation, and create a well-organized state machine. After the jam we added some methods to make this even simpler to do.

We found some bugs in NEEDSIM Life simulation during the game jam that are by now fixed. Testing the beta version at this game jam definitly helped in making NEEDSIM Life simulation a stable product, and in fact, thanks to the insights from this jam, during LUDUM DARE 33 the NEEDSIM Life simulation part of the jam took only minutes to get done.

Reaction

One of the reviewers felt bad for killing the tetrominions, which I believe is a success - simulating the daily life of the characters makes it easy to feel for them as if they were really alive and had emotions. From the reactions I got the feeling that the other jammers easily understood the game, which is not always the case. A number of them mentioned that the idea has potential, and I agree ;)! I think the idea would be worth pursuing a bit more. Unfortunately its not that straight forward to balance the game and make it fun for a longer time. One concern is for example how to deal with tetrominions being locked away if the win condition remains to kill all tetrominions.

I have been hoping to re-visit this game for a while now, so who knows, maybe one day we will sit down together and work on a somewhat better version of TETROMINIONS. In the mean time you can download it from blubberquarks itch.io account.

[gamedevos]

The first essay of one of our GameJam experiences :)

Ludum Diaries 30: Der Klappermann

All right, let’s do this. This is the first part of a coverage of the ludum dare projects, which I participated in.

I won’t explain the whole meaning of ludum dare, but it represents a online-only competition-like event with game developers (designer, writer, coder, sounder, …) around the world. They meet to develop, jam and jam with the goal to create a game from scratch to finish. After 48h (solo) or 72h (team) you have to stop working and submit your creation for the voting process. Most games are experiments and prototypes of cool ideas, which sometimes get expanded into a full-fledged game (i.e. Evoland and McPixel). You can get a pretty decent impression of the vibe on GameJamCurator.

I was very happy to meet the “Spieleentwickler Osnabrück” (Game Developers Osnabrück) in my home area, a group of game developing enthusiasts, which decided to meet in the real world. :D

So we were motivated for our first ludum dare jam and started developing on the weekend from August 22th to August 25th, 2014 . The main team consisted of me, Tilman G. (@OhHelloTilman), Jannes N. (@JannesNagel) and Henning H and we gathered in Jannes and Henning’s welcoming and spacious commune.

The theme was Connected Worlds and the process started with a shader effect, Jannes was experimenting with. The ground below a game character changed the texture from a cozy green meadow to a sinister lava ground. With this base, we began to develop ideas about an evil character, who was planning to occupy the homeworld of some white priests. With the luck of having a very talented 3D-Artist (and Audio-Artist!!), the model and animations quickly came to life: Der Klappermann was born!!

The general gameplay changed constantly over the short time, but we wanted to have a real challenge and some AI, which controlled the enemies. With the power of the Unity Engine, we shortly had a moving character and some haunting enemies. Sometime around midnight, we got stuck at pentagrams as a sign of the white priests. And with your power of connecting to the evil world, you have to weaken it and then hunt the priests. A nice idea and so I had fun with my first Unity game project, designed some parts of the game world, the AI and fixed anything.

Despite the hard deadline, we had a good team-spirit on the last day (monday) and worked till 4 in the morning. Especially writing the description of the ludum dare-entry was a great fun for me.

All in all, it was a experience with no regrets, because I learned much about game development, the Unity Engine and a creative workprocess. And you know, the modern world is all about data. So the voting process and comments are very valuable to get a impression of the funquality of your ideas. Our position of place #159 in the category Overall(Jam) has yet to be beaten. ;)

I can recommend anyone to gather some collaborators and participate in a jam! :D

You have to try it out right now!: Der Klappermann

[gamedevos]

Ludum Dare 34 is coming soon! Keep your game scope manageable!

My Rules for Game Jams

This is how I cut corners in Ludum Dare and other jams:

non-modal interaction

no overworld

no menu-based combat

no world map between levels

simple graphics

stay in 2D unless gameplay is in 3D

keep animations to 2-4 frames

no scrolling,

orthogonal perspective

no alpha blending, only color key

keep the color palette small (5 per sprite, 16 per screen, 32 total)

no realism, take inspiration from cartoons

no fancy AI algorithms

no A* search

no learning

no constraints solving

simple mob behaviour

human-vs-human multiplayer for intelligent enemies

no online multiplayer

turn-based multiplayer can be played with only one keyboard

local co-op is tricky

simple game tools

bfxr for sound

autotracker for music

gimp for environment art (backgrounds/tilesheets)

aseprite for characters/animations

if you do a 3D game, use 2D tools and put the sprites on billboards

port to Microsoft Windows after the jam has ended

design the game with a lowest playable resolution in mind

only 5 minutes of content

players are slower than you anyway

This is what I always try to put in:

animation

sound effects

a title screen

a game over screen

a shortcut to take you to the LD rating page

colorblind mode if necessary

This stuff is easy to do and nice to have:

a main menu

gamepad support (if applicable)

music

screenshake

tweet your high score function

a help button