12 students, 8 hours, 3 audience votes, and 1 day on the Expo floor later, Game Center MFA students are headed towards a completed game! Here’s what they’re working with so far.
The theme: Farm Heroes Saga
Audience Picked Constraints so Far:
Single or multiplayer? Multiplayer.
Does this game end or not? Yes, it must end.
Does this game need more Farm, Heroes, or Saga? It needs more farm.
Current Vote: Does the score or the timer end the game?
The Game: Sheep Something (working title) is a competitive sheep herding saga for two players.
The biggest challenge so far (beyond the obvious) has been understanding and interpreting the status of the game upon receiving a build from the design team that worked previously. Without WiFi in the booth, version control is limited to an increasingly long readme file, and whatever has been saved to one of four flash drives that hold the game. Students are introduced to a game that they’ve never seen before, made by other students they may have not previously worked with, and have to quickly process what decisions have been made and then decide how to make progress forward. With only 3 hours to work per shift this is quite a challenge. Nonetheless, by the end of last shift yesterday, the students produced a playable game and they’ll be getting playtesting feedback on the Expo floor throughout the day.
There’s one small bug where the sheep run infinitely, caught in a loop of herding terror, but we’ll get those sheep herded safely and humanely.
There’s a new vote every three hours, so follow along with us at #BoothJam and on our twitter @NYUGameCenter. If you’re at GDC we’re right near the IGF Pavilion, come herd some sheep with us!
Hello from the Game Center booth at the Game Developer’s Conference! We’re here to show folks what making games at the NYU Game Center looks like, so we decided to do exactly that- with a game jam!
Our MFA students are in the throes of a Booth Jam, a 21 hour game jam completed live on the expo floor. They are making game from scratch limited to the time that the GDC expo floor is open. Teams of four are working for 3 hour shifts, and then they each pass a flash drive off to the next person to continue working. It’s a high speed exquisite corpse style game jam, and we already like what we see!
We like to challenge our students, so there’s even audience participation. Every three hours there is an active vote and anyone on the Expo floor or online can help determine the course of the game. Our first vote determined that the game will be multiplayer rather than single player. At the 3 hours completed mark we started a new vote, “Will this game end?” The second team is beginning work now, you can follow updates here and online to see their progress. You can vote too by following #BoothJam on Twitter or follow us at @NYUGameCenter.
And of course if you’re at GDC then come by the booth and check out the game! We’re right by the IGF Pavilion, booth 237.