gccevent1

January 28, 2012
by Brian
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Global Game Jam Coverage

The Global Game Jam 2012 is ongoing. For the latest, keep an eye on our Twitter account. Sometime after the event, the GGJ12 page on this site will be redone to include pictures and links to games produced in the event.

January 21, 2012
by Brian
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At last, the tutorial from this past Tuesday is up online! Note that it only covers stuff not previously covered in the Basic Training series of tutorials from summer, so check those out if you’re starting from the very beginning with Flash. http://gamedev.osu.edu/gcc-tutorials/

January 20, 2012
by Brian
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ECOcar collaboration

Part of a message recieved via the GCC email address:

‘I was wondering if you or a fellow student would want to help my group make a flash game. Basically the game “snake” but with a little car graphic as the head of the snake with trees coming out as the tail while the player gets flowers to make the tree tail longer and get a higher score. (a game like this: http://www.snakegame.net/digisnake.htm )

This would be used as part of outreach for my group/team the OSU EcoCAR team.’

As far as games go, this one should be simple. We’re talking less than a day for the core programming. Any takers should contact joswick dot 3 at buckeyemail dot osu dot edu.

January 20, 2012
by Brian
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Future Giveaway!

We have a 1600 point card for Xbox Live to give away thanks to Microsoft at OSU, and we’ll be giving it away in the near future via a ‘first person to post’ contest. Keep your eyes peeled – you never know when – or where – we’ll hold the contest. It might be worth it to keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter.

In other news, GLOBAL GAME JAM!

January 19, 2012
by Brian
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A look into the development of indie games

It seems that today more and more indie companies are providing looks into the development process. It makes the process more transparent to the consumer, helps in building a fanbase for the game early, and most importantly for us, gives us a cool look into the industry that we might not otherwise have. There are three ‘big’ indie games that I know of that offer such a look into development.

First, there is Toki Tori 2. The original Toki Tori, a puzzle platformer, has quite a long history behind it, first being released a whopping ten years ago for the Game Boy Color. Since then, it’s landed on PC and mobile devices, and Wii (all enhanced, of course). Development on the sequel is expected to conclude in the spring. You can sign up to get your hands on the dev builds – there’s a bit of info on that in the latest update (Update #12 at time of writing). The associated video for the latest build shows that development is definitely still in progress – for example, there’s no animation on the player when you move.
Two Tribes website

The next game in this short list is ‘BIT.TRIP Presents Runner 2: Future Legend Of Rhythm Alien’. Not the easiest name to remember the first time around. Runner 2 is the first spin-off from the popular BIT.TRIP series which orginially debuted on WiiWare, and is now partially on iOS and Steam. As well as the 3DS and the Wii as packaged collections of the entire series. BIT.TRIP RUNNER, an on-rails platformer with light rhythmic elements (look it up on YouTube. I’ll wait), was the best of the series in terms of fan reception and sales, probably because it had the most gameplay out of the series. There is a Runner 2 dev blog where the creators share some progress on the game. There is no playable build, nor was it confirmed there will ever actually be an alpha release (to my knowledge), but still, you get to see how the game’s shaping up.
Runner 2 website

Last, but certainly not least, is ’1… 2… 3… KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)’, a rhythm game in which you provide the music. Originally released in a bare-bones alpha form last April on Steam for Valve’s Portal 2 ARG, the game quickly became a literal ugly baby when the project became rather experimental, having content repeatedly added and deleted. The project eventually stalled altogether, understandably angering a lot of people who paid $10 for an incomplete game. It didn’t really help that only one person in the studio was developing pretty much the entire game. Now that other people are freed up to work on the project, development on Ugly Baby has begun in earnest. You can take a look at what their plan is in a rather detailed public Google Doc which is frequently updated.
Ugly Baby public design doc (Caution: contains some profanity)

If you know of any other alpha-version games like these, tell us and we’ll put them here!