Nordic GameJam 2006

Over the weekend me and my dream team of follow students from ITU participated in the Nordic GameJam and much to our own surprise we walked away as winners.

I’m honored that we won not only the jury award, but also the participants’ award. Taking home both awards meant a great deal to us. One thing is to impress the judges in the jury panel but a whole other thing is to impress all the other participants (many of the full-time professionals from the Danish game development scene). And that is one thing all of us in the group are very very proud of.

All the credits for the superb graphic design must go to group member and graphics artist extraordinaire Bo Behrmann Jensen.

Click on the image to see all the screenshots in more detail.

All game in the GameJam had to be about “Cooperative Multiplayer” and you had to create your game from scratch in less than 48 hours.
Our game is basically about two player working together to fill out the screen and score points. You cannot win the game as such; the aim is merely to score the most points.
One player controls the keyboard (the arrow keys and the spacebar) and is responsible for placing the circles as close to the center as possible. The other player controls the big pencil had are responsible for “fitting” all the circles by erasing the one that do not fit. This player must also eliminate all the monsters and rockets that spawn around the playing field, also by erasing them.
Confused? I bet you are! Download the game, and it’ll all make perfect sense (and yes it is possible to play the game one player, it’s just much more fun with two players).

If you download it, please give it some time to load (a couple of minutes) the long load time are due to an uncompress mp3 file that serves as the very moody background music.

Download the game here (Windows Zip file ~ 14 MB)
Currently offline

BTW: The fantastic background music is from The Marcia Blaine School For Girls.

Updated:
Ok, I’ll step down from the bow of the ship, stop shouting and turn down the Celine Dion soundtrack. We were just so overwhelmed by how our game was received, but some of the other games there really need mentioning. I personally loved the network game BoxWorld and the introduction and soundtrack from Farm Battle was worth every penny. Creating a network based game in less than 48 hours gears a lot of respect in my book.

Hopefully IGDA will host all the game on their website soon, DR (The Danish Broadcast Company) said they would but they are still working out the kinks. Stay tune for more information about this.

The entire GameJam event was a great success and has already created a snowball effect for us that we’ll hopefully be able to capitalize on.