On this episode of the Monster Hunter Podcast: I Will Remember This Day Forever. It’s valentine’s day. We express our love by hunting dual Globuls, Agnactors and do a challenge suggested by our listeners.
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Here are two videos recorded on our Global Game Jam event two weeks ago. The first one was actually recorded and edited by my colleague Katharina Tillmans from Cologne Game Lab. I think she did a marvelous job.
The second one was recorded by a real TV crew that followed us during the 48 hours. The feature is to be broadcasted on the German TV channel 3sat.
Click here to Stream. The text version is here.
Unfortunately, both videos are in German but I assure you everybody is saying incredibly smart and witty things in an eloquent and lovable fashion. Except me. I’m trash-talking like always.
Last year I made a short presentation on TRAUMA at the FROG conference in Vienna. I recently realized that there are actually videos of the conference online. They are a little hidden but you can pretty much watch the entire conference here.
Click here to watch videos of the presentations.
Besides my talk, I strongly recommend checking out the presentations of Ian Bogost and Katie Zimmermann. As expected, they are tremendously inspiring. The only problem is that sadly, you cannot watch what happened afterwards.
The cool thing about Global Game Jam is also discovering the entries from other locations and finding some real gems there. A fellow designer Chelsea Howe made this little game together with Michael Molinari.
The game is about two cute asteroids flying together in space and playing around. It is a quite ingenious twist on the theme “Exctinction” and the title knocks it out of the park. In fact, it is very close to perfection as a Global Game Jam game. It is very efficient in programming effort and assets. With only very few elements it evokes a great deal of emotional attachment. At the same time it completely lets go of any conventions such as rewards, dangers or challenges. What you see and experience and feel is not a means to an end. It is the whole point.
It’s a good example of how having few resources doesn’t necessarily have to be a disadvantage. Good design means developing ideas that match the restrictions. If you just consider this, you don’t even have to give up on ambitious goals.
Good job Michael and Chelsea. Now I’m jealous… in a good way! 
Here is something amazing I picked up from the blog of Warren Ellis. It’s an album called Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell. It is 8 hours long. Each track is around 25 minutes long. It consist only of Drone music.
And you know what? Why the hell not? If we are to go digital distribution, why holding on to outdated ideas of the length of albums? They reflect the capacity of the media they once used. This restriction is gone now. Also, we use music differently. I listen music for hours when I work on my computer. An album that lasts longer and has more ambient, monotone music fits well into that pattern. Conversely, a track that lasts 1 minute is completely useless to me. I look at you, Daft Punk.
Also, this is the first time I’m confronted with Drone music at this epic scale. I’m fascinated by this idea. Listening, I get all sorts of ideas for really weird games. Could be also because of the evocative title. I must be patient. Must finish TRAUMA first!
Welcome back to another edition of Micro for Noobs where we I learn to win StarCraft 2 battles with zero actions per minute. In the last episode we were talking about some general battle dynamics and how units get more efficient in large quantities. Today we are going to go into specifics of ranged units. Ranged units are important in StarCraft 2 because it is a game where a majority of units is ranged. In fact, there are only 3 real melee units (Zerglings, Zalots and Ultralisks). So it makes sense to learn how to use the rest efficiently. And the key to ranged unit efficiency is the mythical Concave!
The idea of the concave is actually simple. In order to use your ranged units most efficiently, you want then to shoot all the time during the battle and as early as possible. The most efficient formation your units will take when they do that is to stand in a circle around the enemy force with the radius of the circle being their maximum firing range.
Good: All 9 units are able to fire at the enemy. They form a concave.
Conversely, what happens when the units are NOT efficient is when just a few units are in the front firing while a large force is in the back struggling to get in range. There is not really a fancy Gosu name for this so I will call this a “pile-up”. When you still remember the last post from this series you should be able to see why this is bad. A pile-up causes your huge army to fight as a series of small armies. And as we know, the bigger army is always much more efficient than the smaller army.
Not Good: Only 4 units are able to fire. 5 units are outside of firing range. This reduces our 9 unit army to practically just 4 units.
So the key to use your ranged unit wisely is to have a good, wide concave and to prevent any pile-ups from happening. Also, you may want to do anything you can do to disrupt the concave of your enemy and to cause pile-ups to them. So now comes the time where I will reveal the secret on how to pull this off: you look at the map and choose the spots where you engage the enemy wisely.
Generally, your units will tend to actually from a decent concave on their own if they only have enough room to expand. On the other hand, the easiest way to cause a pile-up at your enemy’s army is to engage them when they are in a narrow gap – a choke-point. Luckily the maps in StarCraft 2 are full of various narrow spots you can exploit to your advantage. You just need to remember to look beyond just the ramps. Especially later in the game, when the armies get big, even relatively sizable passages can make a huge difference for the efficiency of ranged units. And if this is not enough, you can still use force-fields and buildings to artificially narrow things down. In any case, the key is to look at the surrounding terrain with the concave in mind and to retreat from battles when you see yourself not having enough space.
Red are places where your units generally shouldn’t be standing when engaging the enemy.
But even if you have enough space, each army will eventually get so big that it will get in the way of itself. The first units that approach a battle will stop when they are able to fire and create an impenetrable wall for the units in the back. The units in the back may find their way to the front only after a longer struggle or only once the units in the front are dead. In this case we actually need to do some *GASP* real micro. You want to go… one step forward. The way to do that is to:
That’s it. All your units will stop fring, walk one step forward, stop and start firing again. If things go well, the units in the back will now be in range so more units will be firing now. This additional damage will likely offset the wasted split-second of nor firing.
Do I have to do everything myself? How to get all units in firing range quickly.
So the concave is the key on how to use your ranged units in a battle efficiently.
It’s the reason why choke points such as ramps are strategically so important.
It’s the reason why wall-ins and smart building placement can be so effective.
It’s the whole point of abilities such as the Protoss force-field.
It’s the reason why flanking can be so devastating (double-concave all the way!)
In fact in our next episode we shall see that even the melee units have their own version of concave called “Surround” and how it is EVEN MORE important. Until then:
Game Designer’s Corner: It’s interesting to note that it would have been conceivable to come up with a path-finding routine that would not suffer from this problem. Units in the front could pay attention if they are holding other units back from firing and simply move aside. In fact, this is what happens outside of battle. This means that this is actually a deliberate game design feature. Abilities like force-field, to some extent Fungal Growth and the general design of multi-player maps seem to play into this. Star Craft 2 is consciously designed with this aspect being a core part of the gameplay. The takeaway is that not everything in a game needs to be intelligent and user-friendly. It’s absolutely possible to stop at some point and to declare a usability issue into a game mechanic. However this needs to be a conscious decision rather than accident in oder to take full advantage from it.
On this episode of the Monster Hunter Podcast: Water Jho. We get ahead of ourselves and attempt a Devil Jho capture quest with questionable results.
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Final Global Game Jam post on here. I thought I collect some thoughts and insights on how to create a good Global Game Jam. This is from my experience of having organized two of them. It’s is not really a walktrough but more of a personal to-do list for the next time. Feel free to chime in.
Put Up A Huge Clock This may sound simple but we didn’t do that the first time at all. Of course you will need a huge countdown timer! And it’s actually a good idea to keep it running all the time. It helps so much to keep everybody on the edge and helps in planning ahead. I actually coded a good countdown timer myself. It even shows tweets. It was a great help. People were always reading what’s going on in the world when they walked past it. It helped establishing an global atmosphere. Get it here!
Put Up A Stream and Stream Yourself Again, this is something we didn’t do the first time. This time around, we were prepared but not as well as we could. What you always want is to have a huge projector showing streams from other locations. The problem is that the Global Game Jam website doesn’t offer such a feature. They only offer a huge list of all availible streams. We have built a very simple tool to switch through a couple of them every couple of seconds. This worked well but we had only 20 or so streams, getting it full-screen was a bit difficult and it didn’t detect any dead streams. Next time, we need to come up with a better system.
Same goes with streaming ourselves. We had a small webcam going and it did stream our location. But the quality was pretty low. It was pretty dark so you couldn’t see too well. Because we streamed from a Mac, there was hardly anything we could do to enhance the picture. Also, we had no computer running where people could see that anything is streaming at all or even interact with the chat on Ustream. Next time, it may be wise to set up a dedicated streaming machine to make this a more prominent feature. Also, presentations weren’t really featured on the stream. It would have been nice to set up the camera so it can eavesdrop when somebody shows their game.
Good Internet is Paramount we had that problem the last time and we had it again. The Internet wasn’t good. It was easier to set up now but people were always disconnecting. The IT guys weren’t a help at all. We almost couldn’t stream because of this. Next time, we really need to stress this point even more.
Get Drink/Food Supplies This is something that went well again and we should do everything we can to continue. We always manage to get Red Bull as a sponsor and to send us lots of free energy drinks for everybody. This is basically the fuel that keeps everybody going. This is a MUST. What I really liked was that we also managed to convince a bakery to give us their leftovers. This way, we had always some free breakfast/snacks for everybody. That also helped a lot!
What To Do Afterwards? One thing left: we need to consider better what to do AFTER the Global Game Jam. Our website should be prepared so it shows the entires. We should come up with a plan on how and where to feature the results. This is still something we need to manage better.
Welcome to the 3rd and last part (part 1 here and part 2 here) of the Global Game Jam Cologne games round up. These are the final 3 titles and I have been saving up some real gems:
Authors: Dominik Lazarek, Carsten Ruhr, Julia Zaadstra
Coherence is at first sight a 2D jump & run. However, you will quickly realize that there is more to it. The game is divided into two worlds, one attached upside-down to the other. Your character can switch between the two. Interacting with one world affects the other and vice versa. You can also carry objects from one world to the other. The goal is to figure out how the two worlds are connected and to establish a balance. The game comes in a beautiful monochrome look and some lovely smooth animations. Definitely something to check out!
Authors: Kelvin Autenrieth, Stephan Schlößer, Thomas Trocha, Patrick Noppel
Cure stand for me as the best ways to approach a Global Game Jam project. A team of 4 (!!) decided to create a very simple twin-stick shooter. They had the game running in hours and spent the rest of the time creating new levels, enemies, weapons and focusing on the ballance. The result is perhaps the most complete game from the entire Global Game Jam in Cologne. The shooter has an Inner Space theme. You shoot at bacteria inside the bloodstream of a human. There is even a simple ecosystem simulation as the bacteria multiply! I really do hope that the guys manage to polish this one up to a real release. It looks almost done to me.
Author: Peter Bickhofe, Markus Hettlich
Epic Extinction is a very interesting entry. First of all, it’s a nice, polished Orbital / Osmos kind of game. The sun has exploded and you steer the Earth trough space in search for a new sun. You need to hurry up since the population is dying. The cool thing is that Peter Bickhofe and Merkus Hettich – the developers of Epic Extinction convinced the developers of The Great Tuna Escape and H.I.V. Extinction 1981 to merge their games into a big compilation with a common, crazy narrative. So by playing Epic Extinction you can play the other two as well. That’s what you get from sitting at one table. It’s a wonderful idea that embodies the cooperative spirit of the Global Game Jam!
So that’s it! I hope you take a look at the games, they are certainly worth it. And if you live in or near Cologne save the date for the next Global Game Jam exactly in one year. We were very happy with the way the event turned out and we will do our best to repeat it in 2012!
Let’s continue with the second part (part 1 here) of the Global Game Jam Cologne games round up. This time I have another 3 exciting titles:
Authors: Marcus Simon Nina RSAK Stacy
8-Bit(ch) Slap Apocalypse is yet another delightful surprise. The programmer Marcus Horn decided to go low-def 8bit and PORTABLE. The game was actually made for the Nintendo DS but it uses the palette and resolution of the old GameBoy. The game is fully playable as a ROM. You can also download it on a DS if you have a flash card. It is a hardcore side-scrolling brawler with cute, tiny JRPG sprites and gratuitous splatter effects. It even features a badass chopper sequence. To be honest, I have no clue how the team pulled off such a complex and rich game. Definitely check it out!
Authors: Christoph Franke, Linda Kruse
The Great Tuna Escape is one of the simpler, down-to-earth games. You are controlling a tuna fish and you need to keep alive as long as possible. As far as I understand, the CGL student Linda Kruse did the simple, yet effective graphics. The programmer Christoph Franke actually had to learn Flash from scratch working on this project. I think the simpler games are much more effective at the Global Game Jam since you always need at least some time to polish the gameplay. The Great Tuna Escape is a good example of how to pull it off.
Author: Martin Wisniowski
An Accident In Paradise is a great example on how you can participate at the Global Game Jam even if you have little time. Martin sadly didn’t have too much time this weekend. So he did the simplest game he could think of. He was aiming at something that would take 20 minutes. It still took 8 hours but he could still squeeze it in and the result is much more effective than it might look. It’s a 1-button-game where players shoot bullets at each other. You cannot dodge but the bullets cancel each other out. By waiting a couple of seconds, each player can “charge up” their bullet. Bullets with a bigger charge absorb smaller bullets. It becomes a very quick mind-game of different strategies and counters. Something you wouldn’t expect from such a simple game.
On the other hand, An Accident In Paradise is yet another example how the iPhone is not the best environment for the Global Game Jam. The game is finished but not finished enough for the App Store. So there is no way you can play it now. Let’s hope Martin manages to get it on the App Store eventually!
That’s it for today. I will present the final 3 games tomorrow!
