Scottish Game Jam 2010 from JonSykes on Vimeo.

With Kestutis Tauckela, Anders Elfgren, James Strain and Muir McDonald from APB developer Realtime Worlds joining David Thompson from Denki Games as our judging panel, each of our nine teams presented their games and allowed the panel to get hands on with the games and award scores out of 30 based on design and gameplay criteria. In the end, the winning game was Panda Dragoon: Bees On Ice, with the three top-scoring teams scooping APB swag and a Gamestation gift card.

Here’s each of our games, how they scored, and a link to download each of them from the Global Game Jam website. Each link opens in a new window:

1. Panda Dragoon: Bees On Ice – 105 points – Download
2. Oh No! A Black Hole! Thank FUCK for the Intergalactic Moving Agency! – 102 points – Download
3. Hardcore Sinkopation – 99 points – Download
4. Bacterial Warfare – 91 points – Download
5. Sewer Love – 83 points – Download
6. Ghostlight – 80 points – Download
7. Command and Deceive (joint 7th) - 76 points – Download
8. How Do I Shot Web? (joint 7th) - 76 points – Download
9. The Lord of the Rink: The Return of Rampuck – 65 points – No download available!

Some of the point tallies were extremely close, so hats off to those who just missed out on the top three because you all did brilliantly. Every last team put in the effort and produced something playable for the judges to try out in the space of 48 hours; a test of skill, stamina, endurance, and how many energy drinks and junk meals they could stomach without feeling ill.

Congratulations to our winners and commiserations to everyone else – we’ll hopefully see you all again next year!

Some teams are simply working away at tweaking little bits of levels here and there – a level of Hardcore Sinkopation almost brought one playtester to the edge of nausea – while others are pulling off more dramatic stunts; the Command and Deceive team’s network code fell through and hence a single-player game is being crafted out of what has already been produced as the final hours tick away.

No matter which team you’re looking at, the emphasis is on work, work, work. Not one jammer is sitting prone; whether locked in conversation with a team member, huddled over a tablet or a laptop hammering away at code or perfecting that final piece of art, everyone is keeping busy. After all, with staff from APB developer Realtime Worlds, Scottish gaming site SquareGo and games company Denki making themselves known at 3pm to judge the games, along with a former Caledonian student, the emphasis is definitely on making a good impression.

The Team – Gonzalo, Juan Carlos, Mariana, Gabriel

The Game – Sewer Love

The Pitch – Even bacteria can fall in love. Or run away from it, in this case. Sewer Love is a game in which your job is to guide a bacteria down a sink drain to safety and freedom at the end of the pipe. The problem is, the drain is populated with white cells which are attracted to the bacteria, in a classic case of forbidden love.

Controlling the game world, LocoRoco style, is critical to success as you have no direct control over the bacteria. Instead, you manipulate the world and rotate it to keep the bacteria safe from harm and away from the cells drawn towards it. To help you along the way you can find certain pickups which modify the bacteria, making it ugly and unattractive to the white cells for a short space of time.

The games are very much in the “tidying up” sort of stage – the basic mechanics for most of our teams’ games have been defined and it’s all about tightening, tweaking and expanding these mechanics to produce a more complete product in time for submission at 3pm UK time.

We’re seeing level expansions and mechanic tidying and even some last-minute alterations to code that’s suddenly gone wrong; but nothing seems too tricky for our steadfast Scots. Entire engines have been roped together in the space of just over one day with little or no modification needed – now it’s time to finish wrapping a game around the inner guts.

The nightshift will continue for many; have a look at the Flickr slideshow for a taste of what’s been going on!

The Team: Bunny at the Window – Michael, Iain, Stephen, Ben, Iain, James

The Game – The Lord of the Rink: The Return of the Rampuck

The Pitch – Players assume the role of the legendary Rampuck as he attempts to escape from the dastardly Zamboni in their ice rink arena. LOTR is a 2D platformer where Rampuck must jump obstacles and manipulate objects to reach his goal.

However, as the game goes on, the controls are switched at certain points in the game’s level. This can be as simple as switching left with right and up with down, or as complex as swapping the entire functionality of the Xbox controller’s face buttons with the d-pad, or mixing them up altogether! Audio cues and vibration cues from the controller indicate when the controller layout will change…but it’s up to you to figure out what’s been moved around!

The Team – Craig, David, Stuart, Matt

The Game - Oh No! That’s a Black Hole! Thank Goodness for the Intergalactic Planetary Moving Agency! (working title)

The Pitch – Oh No! is a digital board-game-style game revolving around an astronomical disaster which you must work to avert! A solar system is on the brink of being sucked into a black hole and being lost forever and various corporate companies are working to secure contracts against the system’s various planets in order to profit from the salvation of the planets’ citizens.

Oh No! is a hotseat multiplayer game in which each player (representing a corporation) plays various dastardly, deceptive event cards (all publicly detailed) in an attempt to sabotage other companies and claim the solar system’s various planets as their own. Controlling the greatest number of planets is key to victory and gaining planets adds to each player’s victory points total. On top of this, planets share various trade routes and companies can claim these for extra victory points.

To keep things competitive players can undercut each other and destroy trade routes and reclaim planets from one another to gain more victory points. Naturally, the player with the most victory points at the end of the game wins!

The Team: Team 4 – Brian, Alastair, Sean, Trevor, Paul

The Game – Hardcore Sinkopation

The Pitch – This game has been designed to mess with how you expect games to behave. Most games work on getting you into a state of flow where it becomes easy to predict what will happen next. Hardcore Sinkopation is playing with what you would expect; playing with the flow of the game itself and making you jump when it throws you off course when you least expect it.

It’s a rhythm action game where players are lulled into a false sense of security with music and visuals they become used to. Once they are in a comfort zone extra elements – such as new forms of music, visuals and cues – are added into the mix, throwing players off of what they were used to and making them accommodate the new changes and then mixing it up again just as a player gets used to the new situation.

In essence, Hardcore Sinkopation is a game based around lying to you about what’s going to happen next.

Oh, and Gianna Cassidy from Caledonian University made us some adorable cupcakes that are just far too nice to eat. Seriously. They’re adorable.

We’ve been able to jump between some of the teams and grab some screens and some videos, and we can share some photos with you now in yet another handy Flickr photoset. In it you can see a screenshot from Ghostlighting and How Do I Shot Web? and see some art from Panda Dragoon taking shape. All this in 24 hours…we’re expecting some seriously brilliant stuff at the end of the Jam.

Keep an eye on the usual channels (@scottishgamejam on Twitter and ScottishGameJam.org) for more SGJ news!

The Team: Monochrome - Yasmin, Stephen, John, Michael, Andrew

The Game – Ghostlight

The Pitch – Ghostlight is a platforming game revolving around a little boy trapped inside a haunted house. In order to escape the house he is equipped with a magic torchlight that is capable of shining light in three different ways: it can make platforms and interactive objects such as ladders appear, it can make walls and deceptive ghostly platforms disappear and repel ghosts which are attracted to the first two types of light.

The haunted house has multiple routes of escape and each is full of various tricks and traps you must navigate around using your magic torchlight and various ghosts you must dodge your way around while avoiding falling victim to the house and its devious ways.