Nine teams of around 40 jammers are taking part in this year’s Scottish Game Jam, so here’s a handy guide to each of them and how their games are adhering to the theme of deception and the constraints of rinks, winks and sinks!

The Team: Team 00000001 – Dave, Anna, Razvan, Donald

The Game – Bacteria Warfare

The Pitch – BW is an action game that pits you as a good bacteria (like the ones you get in yogurts, we presume) against some nasty bad bacteria in that most hostile of microbiotic environments, the common household sink. As a rightful, honest bacteria you must prevent the bad bacteria from advancing on, entering and therefore clogging the sink by deceiving them into pursuing less hazardous but just-as-attractive desires.

These can include laying false trails for the bacteria to follow or dropping crumbs of food across the sink area to lead the bacteria away from the plughole. Gameplay is level-based and each level has a time limit the player must keep the sink unclogged for. Beat the time limit to advance to the next level.

Nine teams of around 40 jammers are taking part in this year’s Scottish Game Jam, so here’s a handy guide to each of them and how their games are adhering to the theme of deception and the constraints of rinks, winks and sinks!

The Team – Jon, Andy, Henry, David

The Game – Command and Deceive

The Pitch – Command and Deceive is a top-down real-time strategy game exclusively designed for multiplayer across a local area network (LAN). Each player has control of an army made up of gunners, RPG-armed soldiers, tanks and APC vehicles with the general aim being to defeat the other player’s army. However, half of your troops are “fake” and do not exist – but your opponent cannot tell which soldiers are real and which are not.

As a result the strategy lies in misleading your opponent into attacking your fake troops while coordinating the efforts of your real soldiers and vehicles to launch a strike on your opponent when they least expect it. On top of this, Special Generals can render parts of your squad or the map invisible, plant minefields and even fool your opponent’s troops into turning on each other.

Nine teams of around 40 jammers are taking part in this year’s Scottish Game Jam, so here’s a handy guide to each of them and how their games are adhering to the theme of deception and the constraints of rinks, winks and sinks!

The Team: Frat Boys From The Hood - Jess, Abi, Andrew, Hazel, Alex

The Game – Panda Dragoon: Bees On Ice

The Pitch – Panda Dragoon is a single-player action game where players assume the role of the titular panda in an attempt to rid the world of various devious evil creatures. Set entirely on an ice rink, you defeat your enemies by shooting bees from your mouth. The catch is that your enemies are able to jump between a “light” and a “dark” realm, so they can hide from you and convince you they are not there. Fortunately, Panda can switch backgrounds to catch out enemies and stop them from getting too close.

Nine teams of around 40 jammers are taking part in this year’s Scottish Game Jam, so here’s a handy guide to each of them and how their games are adhering to the theme of deception and the constraints of rinks, winks and sinks!

The Team - Timon, Richard, Steve

The Game – How Do I Shot Web?

The Pitch – HDISW? is a multiplayer game where each player takes on the role of a spider trying to escape from a particularly troublesome sink. Each spider is in competition with each other with the winner being the first to escape from the sink. Escaping the sink involves climbing various platforms and using your web to destroy platforms other spiders are on. Some platforms are misleading and can collapse making your escape more difficult, as if being attacked by your fellow spiders wasn’t making it hard enough already!

More team pitches to follow soon on the SGJ blog!

It’s 11am on a surprisingly sunny morning in Glasgow and our teams are fresh from their sofa-based snoozes, ready to brave another long day out of the sun and in front of their monitors as we press on with the final hours of day one of the Scottish Game Jam.

Our nine teams of around 40 people are cracking on hard with their projects with bellies full of food and minds completely focused on the job at hand. Codemonkeys are coding, designers designing and artists…arting. As you might have seen in the Generating Graphics post earlier this morning games are already taking graphical shape and developing their own unique visual styles; now most of the work lies in getting the code together to make these graphics more than just pretty faces.

17 hours in, things are really starting to take shape. We might even have some games ready to play by the end of the first day!

Later in the day we’ll be running a series of blog posts on each of the teams, with a basic idea of what their game is going to involve. Until then, keep an eye on the usual channels:

• Twitter
• uStream
• SGJ IRC chat (channel: scottishgamejam)
• Flickr

The 9th hour of the Scottish Game Jam is underway and it’s become a little too much for some of us as the Sandman takes hold which is, of course, a massive shame and nothing we should poke fun at at all. If we ignore the header image of this piece, anyway.

Anyway, 8 hours into the Jam and ideas have gone from whiteboard planning to solid coding efforts and we’re beginning to see some graphics take form as each team’s artists get to work. We’ve even managed to pester some of the jammers enough to let us see some of their graphics. At one end of the scale we have direct screengrabs from within the games already, and at the other we have sprites from the teams who aren’t quite ready to show us their games in action.

That said, 8 hours into the Jam is very early days…have a look at the screengrabs and sprites in the Flickr slideshow below, and keep an eye on here and our Twitter feed for more as the night goes on.

Creeping up to midnight here in Glasgow and everybody’s in full-on work mode (save for a couple of sneaky visits to the nearest takeaway).

Our 9 teams have been busying themselves for the past five hours working on planning out game mechanics, getting down to the nitty-gritty coding and even working on some graphical assets. The chances are we’ll see a lot of basic playable games starting to appear in the middle of the night.

The theme of Deception has been taken on board by all and each of the teams has their own ideas for the “rink”, “sink” or “wink”, which the SGJ blog will hopefully be sharing with you very soon! Until then, all we can do is direct you to the SGJ Twitter for up-to-the-minute news and encourage you to keep an eye on our Flickr feed for further snaps fresh from the Ground Zero that is the Saltire Centre.

The Scottish Game Jam uStream channel is viewable here! You can also join a live IRC chat; visit webchat.freenode.net and enter channel “scottishgamejam”.
Video streaming by Ustream

A little late in running but the Scottish leg of the Global Game Jam, being held in the Saltire Centre of Glasgow Caledonian University, is almost underway! Contraints and theme have been revealed to the 43 jammers and they’re almost done setting up their development beasts in the open-plan area of Caledonian’s library.

The Theme for the SGJ is Deception, meaning games must revolve around trickery and fooling around with an opponent (or maybe even the player!), and on top of all that the game must contain either a Rink, a Sink, or a Wink. A tricky task? Not necessarily so for the best, foolhardiest developers, designers and artists that Glasgow and beyond can cough up.

The 43 jammers were introduced to the SGJ with a presentation from Dare To Be Digital from The University of Abertay Dundee and an additional talk on game jams by Realtime World’s Kestutis Tauckela, who is taking a break from developing up-and-coming MMO All Points Bulletin to oversee the entire Game Jam from Friday to Sunday. On top of all this, university lecturer Jon Sykes will be subjecting each jammer to a quick questionnaire each hour to see how they’re coping on an emotional level, all in the name of SCIENCE.

We’ll keep you posted through various channels, but most notably through our Twitter feed @scottishgamejam. Keep an eye on it, spread the word, and watch for our uStream coming online on the GGJ homepage!

Glasgow out!